Fly, Fly, Fly, Silver Seeker in the Sky
by Archaeopteryx Feather
Summary: G1. Starscream was an explorer: self sufficient, driven and resourceful. But when his best friend, Skyfire, disappears in a freak storm, the young Seeker is up against his biggest challenge yet. Will his courage and skill be enough to fulfill his new mission—to save Skyfire, whatever the cost?
1. Chapter 1

It's November, and you know what that means-NaNoWriMo! The time of the year where authors try to write a 50,000 word novel in a month. :) I decided to post my daily work here to soak up whatever moral support I can get from y'all, but fair warning: this story is going to be totally unedited. Edit: parts of this story are now edited.

Hope you enjoy!

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**Fly, Fly, Fly, Silver Seeker in the Sky**

Starscream's excitement mounted as they drew nearer to the S-Ds-58976. The star was a yellow G-type sun and one of the brightest stars in the Firework Galaxy, but neither he nor Skyfire were interested in its plasmous glory. It was impossible to be interested in a mere sun when S-Ds-III, the third planet in the system, had liquid oceans. Water could mean the richest prize of all: organic life.

The silver Seeker mentally counted down the minutes as they coasted in, passing a trinary star system and slowly decelerating. It had taken them almost twenty-seven years to reach the planet. Twenty-five of those years had been spent in stasis as they crossed the vast barren expanse between the Great Spiral and the Firework. The final two had been spent exploring. Cybertron's home galaxy was now visible only as a faint glowing blur; they were truly flying where no one had left a contrail.

"Think it'll have any life?" Skyfire asjed.

"283," Starscream replied. "That's a lucky number, don't you think? I have a good feeling about this one."

S-Ds-III was the 283rd destination of interest on their journey, though that number was subject to change upon a whim. Most of their trip had been planned out in advance when they arrived in the Firework. They had set up the net of SURVEY telescopes at the edge of the Magnificent Arm and spent several weeks waiting impatiently while it compiled data on Firework's 300 billion stars. There was certainly no way they could visit all of them, but why bother when they could cherry pick the most interesting systems? They had compiled a list of 1,056 nearby destinations of interest, many of which promised to host organic life.

But thus far they had been unlucky—only one planet had hosted life, and mere unicellular life at that. Skyfire, always hoping for intelligent life, had been waiting to arrive at 283 since the moment SURVEY had found a water rich planet in the habitable zone.

Now, however, he was doing an excellent job of hiding his enthusiasm.

"Aren't you excited, Skyfire?" Starscream said.

"I'm trying not to get my hopes up."

"It doesn't get any better than this. A beautiful blue orb situated in a soothingly warm, comfortably cool orbit around a mellow star, a soft cradle for the ooze of life...perfect. Absolutely perfect."

"Very poetic," Skyfire said, laughing. "You should write tourist brochures."

"I do my best. Now confess. You're excited out of your mind."

But Skyfire had decided to be contrary. In a voice that was equal parts earnest and teasing, he said, "As a serious scientist, I cannot in good conscience share in this impermissible excess of enthusiasm. In fact, to prove my sincere disinterest in planet 283, I propose that we stop for a few days to make a closer examination of this _fascinating_ asteroid field."

"Ugh, asteroids," Starscream groaned. "Why does the universe have to have so many slagging asteroids?"

"After that, I recommend we spend a few days taking samples of the local dust medium."

"Mercy! Mercy!"

Skyfire dropped the pompous tone and assumed a smiling voice, "To be honest Starscream, I have to admit I have a good feeling about this one too—but a small, restrained good feeling. "

Starscream opened the expedition log and recorded aloud, "We're approaching 283. Skyfire is wild with excitement."

"No I'm not!"

They were closing in on the planet now; it was a bright white-blue speck in the distance, growing larger as they approached. The shapes of clouds and continents began to resolve, then colors: blue, white, brown—and green.

"Plants! It has life!" Starscream cried. "See, see, I told you! I told you!"

Skyfire just chuckled. "Are you sure you don't want to stop and take dust samples?"

283 was a solid sphere now, half cloaked in darkness yet shining brilliantly where the sun caught the ocean. A dead grey moon, cratered and blasted, hung in the distance. They passed by it and curved around the planet's side, dropping easily into a high orbit. Around the top of the sphere was a fluorescent crown of red aurora. A blue film of atmosphere wrapped around the planet like an aura.

Starscream trailed behind Skyfire's wing, watching the continents spin slowly by.

"Looks very promising," Skyfire remarked. "There might even be intelligent life."

Starscream decided to keep teasing his friend. "I don't see any lights on the dark side. Is someone letting their wild enthusiasm get the best of them again, hmm?"

Skyfire gave a pedantic snort. "I didn't say there _would_ be intelligent life. I said there _might_ be intelligent life."

"Semantics!"

"Well, let's get closer and find out, shall we?" Skyfire replied good humoredly.

"Let me guess—you have a _good feeling_ about it. But a small, restrained good feeling."

"Oh, hush you," Skyfire replied.

They had worked together for so long that neither of them had to ask what they would do next. With well-practiced coordination they heeled over and Skyfire led the way to the northernmost pole of the planet. The ice-covered top would not be a particularly life-dense area, but it was a useful place to start. A north to south pole sweep of the entire biosphere would give them a good first look at the living system they would spend the next few months documenting.

Starscream dipped his nose and fell into the atmosphere. The perfect silence of space gave way abruptly to a shocking howl as the wind rushed over his sleek pyramidal frame. The air became fire. His hull, cooled to mere degrees above absolute zero, creaked and whined as the thermal-resistant plating abruptly warmed to 3,000 degrees. At his side, Skyfire was glowing in infrared like a miniature sun. Starscream gave a whoop of delight as he streaked downwards.

Below them, the bland white expanse of ice began to take on shape and form; there was a gray ocean divided by snow-covered islands, inlets and bays. Starscream magnified as far as he could, looking for animals on those rocky shores, but he was still too far out to see.

His body underwent an inner transformation as he pulled his lightdrive into subspace and replaced it with turbines and atmospheric thrusters. Now he was no longer a creature of space, but a creature of the air. Still he fell, careening down like a meteor.

They slashed through a bank of clouds and swooped down until they were skimming across the choppy surface of the ocean towards a mountainous coast. The wind was rougher than Starscream had expected, and he found himself bouncing uncomfortably as he cut through the turbulence. He drew apart from Skyfire to give himself more room to maneuver.

As they crossed the coastline and the water gave way to barren ice, Starscream felt a stab of disappointment. There were no animals or birds to be seen. _I should be grateful for plants, I suppose,_ he thought, but even the lush verdure that might lie beyond paled in comparison to the exotic bestiary he had painted in his imagination. _Maybe they're all hiding from this wind. _

If anything, the wind was getting worse. It was the sort of weather Starscream might have enjoyed playing in at another time, but right now it was just an annoying distraction.

They roared low over a snow covered ridge. Beyond was a thick wall of blowing snow.

"Not much to see, is there?" Starscream remarked.

Then the storm hit.

He didn't even have time to cry out before the wind screamed out of nowhere and took him. Suddenly the sky was white froth. Artificial darkness fell over the world as the snow blotted out the sun. He struggled instinctively against the grip of the angry wind, but it was like being caught up in a torrent of whitewater.

At his side he caught a glimpse of Skyfire twisting as he fought for control. A sudden gust hurled them towards each other. _Watch out!_ he thought. _No__—__! _

Before they touched, Skyfire banked away and shot off. The bright reds and blues of his jolting form dissolved into the whiteness of wind-whipped snow.

A blast of wind smashed Starscream around and he suddenly found himself plummeting towards the ground in a full stall. With a desperate snarl he kicked on his afterburners and threw all his effort into leveling out. He had fought storms before; he wasn't going to let this one win. He brought his antigravs online, stabilizing himself. With deft motions of his ailerons he turned his plummet into a controlled, if erratic glide.

The ground was invisible in the snow, but Starscream could see it on his sensors. He found a flattish place that looked solid and made for it. Blasts of wind rocked him, shoving him back towards the ocean as if the planet were trying to hurl him away from itself.

_Nice try,_ he thought. _I've __been through__ worse __than you've got__._

Turning off his engines, he descended on antigravs alone. The storm jerked him back and forth, and the spot he had aimed for was too far, then too close, then off to the side. At just the right moment, he transformed.

He landed on both feet with a crunch.

"_Haha! __Yes! Yes!_" He threw out his arms and embracing the wind for a second. It guttered in his intakes and scrabbled at his wings, screeching its futile rage at him. He threw back his head and laughed. A feeling of power swelled inside him like a sweet drug, and he almost felt like throwing himself back into the sky to do it all over again.

But common sense prevailed. Still laughing, Starscream sat down in the snow before the wind could topple him over and spoil the moment. He lifted his head to the sky, letting the snow caress his face. He hadn't been in a storm this intense for months. At times like this he felt so alive that the rest of life seemed like an empty shadow.

He decided to see how Skyfire was doing. Reconfiguring his comm for the planet's atmosphere, he transmitted, "Skyfire, you okay? I just landed. Scrap, that was fun."

There was no reply. Starscream gave a little pout, then realized Skyfire might have bigger things on his mind than answering his comm. He would just have to wait.

He looked around. There wasn't much to see beyond a white blur of snow. The wind crowded his optics with icy needles, and he could feel the snow melting around him as the heat of his body gradually drained away.

"I guess I wait for the storm to let up," he said. His voice was lost in the howling of the wind.

He settled himself more comfortably, shook the snow out of his steaming thrusters, and scooped up a handful of snow. With a quick gesture he tossed it into the wind and watched it whisk away. Then, taking a reading on his airspeed indicator, he turned on his log.

"I'm at 283 now. Not a friendly place. Snowing heavily. Windspeed is about 190 mph, with gusts up to 205. Very brisk; I had a fun landing." He grinned to himself, imagining Skyfire's reaction to his choice of words. "There is life, plant life anyway. Not that I've seen any of it yet. Must wait till storm lets up to go on; will begin taking readings on gravity, atmosphere comp., etc. in the meantime." He closed his log.

For several hours he entertained himself by gathering readings and entering them into the form they had developed to log their findings. Periodically he tried calling Skyfire, but without success. He supposed the other jet was either out of range or hidden behind a mountain or some such obstacle.

Evening fell sooner than he had expected, and he was reminded that the planet was tilted on its axis: in the high latitudes there would be very little daylight at all during winter. He recorded the observation in his log and noted the time of nightfall for later reference.

Soon he could no longer see anything beyond the tiny red circle of light cast by his optics. He considered turning on his exterior lights, but it seemed pointless since there was nothing to see. All he could do was sit, listening to the wind shriek and moan. When he turned off his optics as an experiment, he felt curiously disembodied, as if he were floating in a stormy sea. Now it caught at his wings, then it fretted his intakes. All was motion and noise, yet nothing moved.

"Staaaarscreeaaaam!" a voice called.

His optics came back online. "Skyfire?" he said. Quickly he opened his comm and repeated, "Skyfire?"

There was no reply. He got to his feet and yelled, "Skyfire!" A moment passed, then he added, "I'm over here!" Still there was nothing.

He wondered if he had really heard his name at all. It made no sense that Skyfire would yell for him rather than using the comm. _Just the wind, __I guess__,_ he thought.

He settled back down. The spot he had been sitting in was already full of snow. He remembered a legend he had heard once on a far distant planet. According to the story, there were dead spirit-birds that lived in the wind and cried out the names of lost children to lure them to their death. The wind gave a particularly lifelike shriek, and a chill ran through him.

"Let's not start scaring ourselves," he muttered.

_"Whe__eee__re __aaaa__re yo__oo__u?" _someonecried in the distance.

Starscream paused. Then, uncertainly, he shouted, "I'm over here!" He turned about, trying to tell where in the blackness it had come from, but he could not say. Snow battered his face and filled up his intakes. Absurd, of course. It was just the wind and he knew it. This time he didn't bother with his comm.

The night wore on, and the wind kept screaming. Again and again, he thought he heard his name being called, or Skyfire yelling something unintelligible at him, the garbled voice now near, then far away. Once, he got up and walked towards where he thought the sound was coming from, only to stumble on a hidden outcrop and fall flat on his face.

"And that," he observed wryly, "Is how the spirit-birds deal with foolish children."

After that he stayed put.

He welcomed the pale, snow-shrouded dawn with relief. Now that he could see again, it was obvious that the wind had lessened overnight. It was still not safe to fly in, but he could afford to wait. To celebrate the passing of night, he raided his energon store and gobbled down two handfuls of energon goodies.

"Morale is reviving," he reported in his log.

When the wind got down to 100 mph, he took off and forced his way upwards, relying mostly on antigravs. It was easier going this time. Soon he punched through a layer of clouds and found himself in calm air. Around him silvery clouds basked in the light of a chill morning sun. The air was thick with cold.

He tried Skyfire again and felt irritation when there was still no response. Apparently Skyfire was now on the other side of the planet. Starscream's annoyance mounted. _He could have at least __asked how I was doing before he took off to __go __have fun without me__._

He decided that the first order of business was to find his friend. Cruising up into the pale blue sky, he made his way into orbit. Once again 283 hung silently below him, the planet's serene visage giving no hint to the chaos that had reigned on the surface.

"Skyfire, where are you?" he asked the planet below. He circled the planet, sending out pings and waiting for a response. Once, twice, three times he orbited, puzzled and increasingly irritated.

It wasn't until the fourth time around that he felt a new emotion: worry.


	2. Chapter 2

A twist of red aurora swayed towards him across the surface of the atmosphere and Starscream looped and chased it, playing with like a cat with a string.

He wanted to believe that Skyfire had made an unscheduled visit to the asteroid belt, or was refusing to answer his comm for some reason. Yet neither of those alternatives seemed in character for his friend. Skyfire would never leave the planet he had been waiting to visit for years, and it made no sense that he would refuse to answer. Nonetheless, Starscream decided to make sure. He turned on his interstellar communicator and sent out a broadcast throughout the solar system,

"I'm getting kinda worried here, Skyfire. Are you there?"

He was not really surprised when there was no response.

A disturbing picture was beginning to take shape. He remembered the way the Skyfire had been struggling in the storm, and when the other jet had veered off... What had happened afterwards? Starscream had made his first call just a few minutes later, and Skyfire hadn't answered even then.

Yet if Skyfire really was in trouble, then why hadn't he called for help? And why was there no emergency beacon broadcasting a continuous call over all frequencies?

Frowning inwardly, Starscream hovered over the turning planet in geosynchronous orbit, looking down on a patch of cloud that now obscured the area where the storm was blowing itself out.

"Skyfire?" he tried once more, hoping to hear an answering "Yes?" that would prove all his fears to be silly nonsense. But there was still nothing. Suppose Skyfire was hurt?

He forced down the wave of anxiety that rose up inside him. This called for calm thought, not groundless speculations. He needed to go down to the place where he had seen Skyfire last and search. The storm wouldn't have let up yet, but he had proven he could fly in it now. He would start out by searching a fifty mile radius around the spot where he had seen Skyfire last. That would be 2,500 square miles to cover, and the snow would mean he would have to rely on sensors alone, but it was not infeasible. _Anyway, I like flying in storms, right? It__'__ll add extra challenge._

Abruptly he remembered how he had laughed at the storm, so proud of his own prowess that he hadn't even considered that Skyfire might be having trouble. A feeling of shame came over him, and he resolved that he would take the storm seriously—there would be no fun or play. Not when Skyfire's life could depend on it.

The decision galvanized him into action. He sped back down through the planet's atmosphere, ignoring the searing heat that blasted his hull, and punched through the layer of clouds. Underneath the cloud cover, all was snow and heavy wind. He descended and activated his geological scanners. He would need to look for a large, hollow, metallic body with high conductivity that protruded slightly above the surrounding landscape—Skyfire's familiar jet mode signature.

The air was rough, and he struggled to stick to the parameters he had laid out for himself. His scanners had limited range, and he had to take care that his transits overlapped lest he miss entire strips of the landscape. He flew blind, relying completely on radar and his other senses. Everything was white; the snow washed over his canopy and tried to stick to the hydrophobic paint on his wings.

He did not want to find Skyfire, not really. If he did, it would mean that the other jet was not, as he hoped, alive and happily incommunicado in some other sector of the planet. At any moment, Starsream expected to hear Skyfire's voice inquiring, "Starscream, where are you?" Then they would have a good laugh together at his overreaction. Most likely Skyfire's comm was malfunctioning or some other triviality, or perhaps he was in some high-walled canyon with poor reception. There was no reason to jump to the worst possible conclusion.

As the hours mounted and daylight turned to dusk, Starscream continued to wait for the call he was certain would come. The search yielded no results. Once he thought he had found something at the edge of his sensor range, but when he swooped down to look, it was just a blob of metal-rich rock. Annoyed, he returned to his flight path. He found several more of the false positives before the day came to a close.

Dusk fell, and as the hours crept by, the storm diminished. By the time morning had arrived the air was clear. A stiff wind still blew down from the mountains, but the clouds were drained of their snowy cargo. For the first time, Starscream got a unobscured view of the area he was surveying.

The place where the storm had struck was nothing but an empty strip of white between the mountains and the coastline. Offshore, cakes of ice floated on the black sea. A small grey river wended its way to the sea, terminating in a sandy fan.

He realized that this was the start of his third day on the planet. Three days since he had seen Skyfire. Something was wrong.

He needed to think. Descending to the edge of the coast, he swooped down to land on a rocky beach. The shoreline was strewn with glassy chunks of ice, and cold waves curled over the pebbles. He kicked a chunk of ice out of the way and began to pace, his thrusters crunching on what appeared to be colonies of living black shells. A distant creature cried at him from a nearby cliff, but he was beyond caring.

Something was wrong. Yes, something was very wrong. He had already searched most of the area he had set out for himself, but as of yet he had not turned up a single trace of Skyfire. The other jet had not called him or given him any explanation for the disappearance. This was not some minor malfunction. Skyfire had been injured badly enough to prevent him from communicating. He pictured his friend's crashed form lying shattered in the snow.

The image sent a jolt of fear through him. He had to find Skyfire _now, _not tomorrow, not next week, but now. But what could he do that he wasn't already doing? He could keep expanding his search radius, but the farther he got from the place where the storm had struck, the less useful it felt. If only he had some kind of clue as to what had happened.

In his mind he reviewed the sequence of events. Skyfire had been last seen heading in a roughly south-easterly direction (though that meant little enough) with a speed of 70 miles per hour. Appromixately two and a half minutes later, Starscream had called Skyfire to tell him that he had landed, but had received no answer. In that time, Skyfire would have travelled only three or four miles from the point where they had separated. Yet Starscream had scanned the area in all directions and found no trace.

Suppose he had been right in his original assumption that Skyfire had been too busy to answer him when he made the call? In that case, Skyfire might have flown safely out of the storm after all. Perhaps he had travelled out of communications range, and been unable to return the message when he was safe. Starscream realized that Skyfire could potentially have been anywhere on 283 by the time Starscream discovered he was missing.

But that still didn't explain why Skyfire's automatic distress beacon had not gone off. The device was well-nigh indestructible. It should have activated if it detected the shock of a crash, so that even if Skyfire was incapacited, it would still broadcast a continuous call for help. But there was no sign it had ever activated at all.

The lack of a beacon was a significant fact, he decided. It implied that a jarring impact was not responsible for whatever had happened. Could he have been mistaken in his assumotuib that Skyfire had crashed? Suppose his friend had suffered some other kind of mishap while blithely walking around around taking leaf samples? Starscream knew better than to underestimate what could happen on an unknown planet. A wave of helpless frustration passed over him. _He shouldn't have gone off on his own_. _If he had just waited for me...!_

He quickly stifled the unseemly irritation. How could he be angry at Skyfire when his poor friend could be lying half-dead somewhere? If anything, he should be angry at himself for not going after Skyfire right away. Why hadn't it occurred to him to follow his friend? He was the experienced storm flyer, not Skyfire. When the other jet didn't respond, he should have guessed that something was wrong immediately. But there had been no distress beacon, and everything had seemed so normal...

A wave of self disgust came over him. _W__hat an idiot I am. _

"I'm wasting time," he said. The only way he was going to find Skyfire was to cover as much ground as he could, and he wasn't going to do that standing around debating with himself. He lunged back into the air and transformed, his engine shattering the silence. _Please be __okay__, __Skyfire_.


	3. Chapter 3

Two anxious days passed, and he covered another 3,000 square miles. There were more metallic bodies here, some of them larger than Skyfire, though not as light or empty. Each time one of them popped up at the fringe of his sensors, Starscream felt a burst of excitement—only to be left cursing as the reading was revealed as a fake. He couldn't help but scrutinize each snowy knob for red engines and wing stripes, though Skyfire's hull would probably be buried under the snow by this time. The thought of the frozen made him uneasy; if Skyfire was wounded, exposure to snow would only exacerbate it. Or what if Skyfire had crashed into the ocean? That would be far worse. And how would he ever find Skyfire if the other jet was underwater? The thought alarmed him.

On the third day, the weather turned bad. The wind remained steady at a mild 30 mph, but the snow came down in flurries. As he flew through the whiteness, he reviewed the facts again and again, trying to find some hidden meaning that would explain everything. Could he have missed Skyfire somehow? What if one of the "false positives" he had dismissed had actually been his friend? And what about the emergency beacon? Could Skyfire have turned the beacon off himself? But why?

_Perhaps he __turned it off __because__ didn't think he was in danger,_ Starscream thought. He remembered that on occasion he had turned his own beacon off when he could see that he would be making a rough landing but didn't want to worry Skyfire unnecessarily. Suppose Skyfire had done the same? But a rough landing implied rough air, and that meant Skyfire should still be near the area of the storm—and there had been no sign of him yet.

Nothing made any sense. Starscream gave a frustrated jerk of his wings. He was trying to build a working hypothesis so that he would know what to do next, where to look, but there was so little data, and none of his interpretations seemedremotely likely. He didn't know for sure where or when or how or even why Skyfire had crashed. He didn't know why Skyfire had not called for help, or why the emergency beacon had not come on. And the only thing he could think of do to was to keep flying the search grid.

One by one days crept by, and no trace of Skyfire emerged. Tightly controlled fear hovered in the back of his mind, suppressed only by force of will. He _had_ to find Skyfire. He _would_ find Skyfire. It was utterly ridiculous that he had not already found Skyfire.

His search grid took him over fresh ground and he soon stumbled over more living creatures—not mere shelly invertebrates, but an entire colony of thousands of plump tusked seals basking on a sheltered section of beach. He swooped down to look at them more closely, turning off his engines and going in on antigravs so as not to frighten them. The seals stared up curiously, _arping_ among themselves, but did not flee into the ocean.

Starscream would have liked to study them, but science was out of the question for the moment. _Skyfire will be excited to see these,_ he thought. He marked the location of the colony on his growing map of the planet and flew on.

A week became two, and another concern presented itself. His survival kit contained three compressed energon cubes, each sufficient for an entire week of operation. He had already used up two of them, and it was becoming clear that he would soon run out unless he collected more. He would have to lay out the solarsheets.

Starscream would have liked to remain near the spot where Skyfire had gone missing, but only a few hours of wintry sunlight ever penetrated the cloud cover that hovered continuously over the coast. Worst still, those few hours had been rapidly shrinking as winter progressed. By his calculations, the entire area would eventually stop receiving direct sunlight altogether. He would have to put his base further south.

Once he considered the idea, it took on a certain appeal. He had wondered if perhaps Skyfire had continued on the north-south transit without him; if so, the other jet might be lying anywhere along the invisible line connecting the two poles.

He flew south, heading inland away down the continent along the path that he and Skyfire had planned to follow. At first he went slowly, paying close attention to his scanners, but when several hours had passed with no result, he gave up and sped up to his regular cruising speed. It would have been typical for Skyfire to divert hundreds of miles off the transit line to investigate a feature of interest, and it was unlikely that the other jet would have stuck strictly to the north-south line.

He reached the edge of a vast range of mountains and gained altitude so that he could cross over. At another time, he might have been delighted at the sight of the endless, pure white peaks stretching out before him, but as he looked at them now all he could think was that if Skyfire had crashed here, it could take a million years to find him. Mountains were some of the most treacherous terrain for flying—at least if you flew too low. What if Skyfire had gotten himself into trouble here? That would be every bit as bad as if he had crashed in the ocean.

Starscream was grateful when he flew over the last of the mountains. Beyond, a great forest stretched out into the distance. He comforted himself with the thought that living trees would surely have been of more interest to Skyfire than the mountains. Why would he stop to look at bare rocks when he could be sudying living things?

The forest had only one species of tree, a local version on the "spruce" body plan which had evolved independently on many worlds. As trees went, they were ugly. The stubby, snow-laded branches grew unevenly about the trunk. Each branch were clothed with prickly black needles that contrasted sharply with the whiteness of the snow. Parts of the trunks were completely bare of branches, while others had small, stunted clumps of dead twigs. Many of the trees had a curious blob growing at the very top, and as Starscream looked closer he could a number of scaly brownish bulbs packed thickly inside.

"I dub thee 'Blob Spruce,'" he said, and made himself laugh at his joke. Then everything was silent again, and the lack of words—the lack of a reaction from Skyfire—made everything seem strangely empty. He had not had time to be lonely with all the searching and worrying, but now he realized that the constant silence was getting to him.

It was not the first time he had been alone for this long; in fact, sometimes he and Skyfire could be apart for months when they split up to pursue their own interests in different systems. Still, Starscream much preferred working with a partner. He liked to have someone to talk problems out with and laugh when he made a joke. _Skyfire will turn up soon,_ he told himself. But after flying through the mountains, he felt unbidden doubts.

Slowly the blob spruce gave way to a mixed forest. Now there were deciduous trees stretching bare black branches to the sky. The trees' architecture was all designed to resist snow load, Starscream noted—the short, sharply angled branches hardly gave snow a place to cling. He recorded the observation in his log.

Heading southward, he cruised over snow-shrouded lakes, frozen rivers, and endless trees. The planet was vast, and as he contemplated how long it would take to search it one square mile at a time, his spirits sank. How could he ever find Skyfire if the other jet was lost out here? It would be a hopeless task.

At last the trees began to thin out, and he skimmed over a snowy plain dotted with animal trails. He was far enough south now that he would be guaranteed a few unbroken hours of daylight each day despite the progression of winter, and he found that he had lost all taste for new scenery. He decided to land and set up camp.

There was an undisturbed spot that looked as suitable as any other. He made for it and landed with a muffled crunch. For a moment he stood there, listening and looking. His hot thrusters sizzled and steamed in the snow, which rose just above his ankles. The wind hissed in his joints, but the day was sunny and clear. There was nothing but the snow and some dead grass sticking out here and there. Satisfied, he knelt and took out a familiar box marked "Maintenance Supplies." The lid came off with a pop.

Within were twenty-five rectangular cartridges, each containing a subspace pocket devoted to storing thirty years worth of nanofluid, additives, spare parts, engine cleaner, oil, and more. But on top was sitting something that didn't belong: a grey spheroid made of rock.

Brow furrowing, Starscream picked it up and examined it. This wasn't part of his survival kit. How had it come to be there? He turned it over, and found writing on the bottom. In an uneven scrawl, Skyfire had written—for it was Skyfire's handwriting, "Crack it open. :)"

He smiled. Skyfire liked to hide little surprises in places where he would find them: gifts from home, interesting specimens, short notes with thought-provoking quotations. Once, Skyfire had hidden handmade puzzle pieces throughout all their gear. It took Starscream weeks to find them all, even with cryptic hints. When he had finally collected the pieces, they formed a picture of him and Skyfire flying together. Beneath was written, "Thanks for being my best friend for 100 years!"

With a deft motion he cracked the rock against the side of box. It broke neatly in two, and inside was revealed a miniature crystal garden. Starscream smiled and held the geode up so that it caught the light. Each tiny stone gem was shaded light blue around the base and red at the tip—his colors. Skyfire must have found it somewhere and decided it would make a nice addition to his rock collection. He wondered how long ago Skyfire had put it there.

For awhile he held the geode, watching how the crystals gleamed in the winter sun. It felt good to hold something that Skyfire had touched, to know that his friend had been thinking of him. He would have to remember to thank Skyfire for it when he found him.

Subspacing the geode's two halves, he turned his attention back to the box. He selected a much-used cartridge with a dot of red on the top.

A press of the button on top released the only part of the kit he used regularly: a solarsheet. It emerged from subspace as a deceptively small metal tin. He set it in the snow and brought out some pegs and a heavy rock. The rock had not been a part of his original kit, but he had adopted it after losing the hammer on a planet 32,000 lightyears away. He had intended to make a new hammer, but in the end he had forgotten about it.

He unclamped the lid on the tin and worked out the shiny black wad that was wedged tightly within. The solarsheet was as thin as foil and crinkled as he unfolded it. On the top was a printed layer of microcollectors, while on the bottom was an ultratough electrum-alloy that could stand up to any amount of punishment. Grommets were evenly spaced throughout the surface to allow it to be staked down. Starscream unfurled the sheet, letting the wind grab it and pull it open for him. Fully expanded, it was a square ten times as wide as his own wingspan. He held it tightly in one hand and grabbed for a stake with the other.

It took him almost an hour (and several pounded fingers) to stake the solarsheet into the frozen ground. When he was done, it was laid out taut across the trodden snow. It reminded him of a glimmering black pool as it rippled at the touch of wind.

One corner flopped around, deliberately left unstaked. He made his way over to it and felt around the edge until he detected a tiny seam in the backing where there was a sort of hidden zipper. Taking the sheet firmly in both hands, he pulled it apart. Bit by bit he tore off a square as broad as his wings. It would reattach later, thanks to the zipper; for now it would serve as a backup power source that he could keep on his own person. He crumpled the square up and returned it to the tin.

The cartridge with the red dot also held the rest of the supplies he needed: a cord with a clip on the end; an adaptor ring; and a boxy energon collector. He screwed the ring onto the cord and attached it into the matching port on the collector. The other end he clipped onto the solar sheet.

With the flick of a switch the collector came online. A tiny blue light blinked for a moment, then assumed a steady blue glow: it was absorbing power. Pleased, he watched a bead of energon gather on a nozzle behind the transparent window on top. S-Ds-58976 was a particularly bright sun as stars went; if the weather was good he should have a full cube in a day or two. In the meantime, he would help himself to a handful of energon goodies.

Sitting in the snow and sucking on a goody, he felt a little better about the situation. True, he hadn't found Skyfire yet, and if the other jet was not near the site of the storm, it would be incredibly difficult to find him. But on the plus side, he was well supplied; he was determined; and he had not yet reached the end of his resources. It might take longer than he had expected, but he would find Skyfire yet. A little persistence, a little ingenuity, and he would inevitably succeed.


	4. Chapter 4

Compared to today, the Earth of nine million years ago was relatively warm and dry. In arctic North America, thick forests of pine, spruce, and birch were widespread. There was little tundra as there is today, and the grasslands were just arriving. Mammoths or moose did not exist—these animals had not evolved yet. But even larger herbivores such as the 16 foot tall tusked dinothere and the strange four-tusked gompothere roamed the landscape with camels, rhinos, giant sloths, and three-toed horses like _Hipparion_ and _Protohippus_. Saber-toothed tigers stalked herds of antelope and trihorned deer. The cats faced competition from a variety of predators: the giant wolf _Epicyon_, 150 lbs of canine ferocity; bear-dogs, a creature that combined the traits of bears and wolves in a powerfully built hybrid, and fast-running short faced bears with long legs and stubby snouts. Humans had not evolved yet and would not do so for another 8.8 million years, but apes and monkeys were common in the tropics.

_ Pelagornis_, a seabird with a 20 foot wingspan (the wingspan of an F-15 is about 43 feet) ruled the skies, snapping up fish with its long beak. Below the water, the monster shark _Megalodon_ hunted a variety of whales that is unmatched in our modern era. Otters swam in the recently evolved kelp forests, and seals frolicked on the beaches.

But only one creature spoke, and reasoned, and learned.

* * *

Starscream returned to the arctic that afternoon and searched a spot to set up his main camp. He eventually chose a dry, wooded valley on the coastal side of the mountains. A quick flight down the vale revealed that it offered plenty of open space to pitch a tent: while the upper slopes were thick with blob spruce, the bottom was almost treeless save for some ankle high younglings.

After walking around the clearing until he was satisfied that the area was sheltered from the storm winds, he drew a square red block out of subspace. He set it down on a flat spot, stepped back a few paces and transmitted an order to the computer within. The block began to shift and sprout as subspace panels disgorged their contents. Lengths of tough weather-resistant coverings unfurled and pulled tight. Finally, the framework was complete, and a domed tent stood on the ground assembled. It was bright red and easy to spot from the air.

He had just begun to get out the stakes when he discovered that he had left the rock back at the plains. Cursing, he mashed the stakes in with his foot. When he was finished, he limped back a few paces and examined his work.

It made him feel queer to see his tent there, standing alone against the stubbly trees. Somehow it seemed to drive home the fact that he was preparing for a long term stay—the exact opposite of wha he hoped for. At the same time, he was grateful for the familiar sight. He unsealed the flap and ducked inside.

The interior was cramped, but Starscream was used to it. He seldom used the tent, preferring to work out of doors and come in only when the weather was particularly foul. But for now it would serve as a clean, dry place to store his gear.

He removed most of the material meant for long-term survival and stacked it against the back wall. The difference in weight wasn't noticeable in his robot form, but when he shifted to jet mode the saved weight would make a significant difference in the range he could cover between refuelings. He saved only what he needed for a week of emergency operation: the square of solarsheet, a single energon cube, a full toolkit, and a converter that could turn a variety of energy-rich materials into fuel in case of bad weather. After a moment of hesitation, he decided not to include the backup communications system. If he got into trouble, there would be no one to call for help. The thought was not comforting. He would just have to hope that he continued to fare as well as he had in the storm.

When he was done he sat down on the floor and opened his log.

"I need to come up with a real plan," he said. "All I've been doing over the last few weeks is expanding the search area around the storm zone. But since I came back from the plains, I've begun to think I'm doing this wrong. Either Skyfire crashed in the storm, or he didn't. And since I already searched there, he must have gone down somewhere else. It's only logical that it would have happened along the north-south transit line."

He paused, considering. "Considering the amount of area along the transit, I believe it would be best to focus only on the most dangerous areas—mountains, storm belts, and whatever else I may discover along the way. I estimate that this task could take several..." His mind said _months_, but aloud he said firmly, "...weeks."

He rubbed his aching foot. "I also need a new hammer."

The hammer, at least, was easily dealt with.

He and Skyfire had discovered long ago that there was no telling what one might need or want on a decades-long journey across the cosmos. It was best to be flexible and manufacture objects on the fly rather than trying to haul around every conceivable object they might need.

In accordance with this philosophy, one of the items in Starscream's long-term survival gear was a compact microfactory. For its size, it was disproportionately powerful; reviewers agreed that it was the best model on the market. He and Skyfire had tested it throroughly before leaving Cybertron and found it was capable of working with 329 materials, from metal to plastic to high strength rubber. With it came a library of almost eight billion blueprints for objects ranging from the complex (a new foot) to the mundane (a hammer). The only limitation on the microfactory's capabilities was the materials it used, and for that Starscream had a matching materials lab that could refine metals, assemble chemical bonds, fuse glass and perform any number of operations.

He hauled out the scratched up box containing the microfactory and lifted the device out by its handle. It was a rugged cube with flaps on the sides that opened up to become part of the base. If needed, the entire box could expand enough that Starscream could fit his whole wing within its interior volume—for self repair was its main purpose. But to make a hammer, the current configuration would suffice. He opened up the blueprint library and quickly found a simple steel hammer with a hollow handle. Smiling wryly, he customized the head with the words "Don't lose this one, you idiot." Then he transmitted the blueprint to the microfactory's computer and received the list of required materials—a small amount of steel.

"Let's see, that should be easy," he said aloud. "I thought I had some here from before..." He opened one of the subspaces on the side of the box the microfactory had been in, and found a hunk of steel left over from a replacement hinge he had made a few months back. "Ah, there you are." He popped the steel into the factory's subspace pocket. "Have fun. I'll be back in a couple minutes." (_I'm talking to inanimate objects,_ he thought. Then, ruefully, _It wouldn't be the first time._)

He stepped outside and examined the sky. It seemed that he had brought a little good weather from the south with him, for things were clearing up. The low cloud bank that had snowed on him all week was receding towards the west, leaving only a few wisps of icy cirrus clouds—it would be cold and windy up there. The sun was already drooping behind the steep white mountains that towered above the valley. Shadows were filling up the footprints he had left in the snow.

From nearby there was a long, chittering cry. He turned and found a minute orange-brown creature perched on the branch of a blob spruce at the edge of the clearing. Without moving, he magnified his vision and looked closer. It was an arboreal tree rodent with a long fuzzy tail and a thin coat of fur. He smiled.

"I hope you intend to be a good neighbor," he said. "We'll get along fine as long as you don't like gnawing scientific equipment." He watched the squirrel as it bounded around the branches, cheeping watchfully to itself. Suddenly the valley felt a little less lonely. It felt good to have another living creature nearby, even a little organic tree dweller.

He went back inside and removed the finished hammer from the microfactory. It was still warm in his hand, and he smiled at the inscription on the head.

"One less problem." He tossed it towards the box that housed the subspace cartridges. With any luck his plan to search the transit line would be just as successful.

At the time, it seemed to Starscream that his plan was perfectly logical. He would have also vouched for the fact that he himself was quite calm and reasonable at the time.

In retrospect he would come to view the months that followed as an episode of madness. Perhaps it was because he wasn't ready to face the size of the task that lay ahead. Or maybe it was a way to express the bottled panic that was growing inside him. One thing was for certain: it smacked of a desperate desire for a quick fix.

He tore across the landscape, flitting here and there along the transit line, hunting for danger. In his mind, he was Skyfire, a unsuspecting cargo jet curiously exploring a deadly obstacle course. He tried to envision where his friend would have gone, which features of the landscape would have intrigued him, what had gone amiss. Could Skyfire have gone to look at the wild goats that leapt among the rocks and slammed into the side of a mountain in a great red bloom of fire? What if he had fallen victim to a rockslide? Or could he have gone down in the trees, spinning out of control until his hull plating was torn off his frame like the skin of a flayed animal? Starscream played dozens of grim simulations over in his mind, and each one fed his sense of urgency.

Careless in his haste, he raced up and down through the mountains, trying deliberately to provoke hidden hazards. He let downdrafts grab him—and almost shattered himself at the bottom of a cliff. He flew through passes where the wind roared like a mad beast. When another storm struck, he flew in it for almost an hour, trying to understand what would have happened to Skyfire—all to no avail. The more dangerous the area, the more he sought it out and the harder he scanned it.

As he went south, he found other hazards to fling himself at—monster thunderstorms; volcanoes that spewed engine-clogging ash; blinding blizzards; and even a great tropical storm that swept in from the ocean and whirled inland before expending itself in torrential rains. He found that he derived an odd satisfaction from his near-death escapes. By risking his life to save Skyfire, he made up in some small way for how he had let Skyfire fly off into the storm alone.

Slowly the winter grew deeper. The darkness closed in tight around his little valley camp. For an entire month the sun did not rise, and "day" consisted of an anemic twilight that lasted a few hours before fading away slowly away into a melancholy sunset. Yet despite the lack of light, it was seldom truly dark. When the sky was clear and the cratered-pocked moon was out, the snow caught the soft lunar light and seemed to glow blue. On those nights the aurora would light up the sky, a dancing green banner that unfurled itself upon the sky like a supersized screensaver. Usually it would be green, but when S-Ds-58976 threw a solar tantrum it would writhe like a snake, and the green would dance with pink, white, red, and blue strands of light.

One day, when he was flying back from the plains to his valley camp, he tried to send a query to the tent about the local weather. When there was no response, he assumed something must have malfunctioned in the tent's transmitter—only to discover that it worked fine when he arrived. It was only after a few days of puzzlement that he discovered the answer to his technical difficulties: the brilliant red aurora roiling across the sky was muddling the signal.

Here was a new clue to the puzzle of Skyfire's missed call. One of their main planetary communication channels relied on skipping electromagnetic waves against the surface of the planet's ionosphere, thereby allowing for communications beyond mere line of sight transmissions. But when the aurora was active, it muddled the ionosphere. Starscream remembered the crown of red aurora that had been pulsing around 283's pole the day they had arrived. Their communications wouldn't have been affected as long as they were transmitting directly to each other on a line of sight, but when the storm hit, Skyfire might have switched bands. The aurora would have thwarted any subsequent attempt at communication.

The theory still didn't explain the missing emergency beacon, but it did make Starscream feel like he had accomplished something. It was a small victory, and he clung to it as month after month of disappointment passed.

As the winter wore on, his spirits sunk lower and lower. He grew tired of the arctic; tired of the snow and the dead, empty landscape and the foul weather and the constant darkness. It would have been easy to move his camp south, but perversely he stayed. It was a matter of loyalty, somehow, to remain near the spot where he had seen Skyfire last. "Anyway," he assured himself, "Spring will be here soon."

He held tightly to the thought. Somehow spring would make everything all right. When the snow melted, Skyfire's red and white hull would show up against the green and brown landscape like a beacon. It would be easy to scan huge swaths of ground from orbit and entirely new methods of search would open up. He would find Skyfire when spring came.

If he had guessed what spring would actually bring, he might have wished winter to last a little longer.


	5. Chapter 5

By the time spring came, the arctic landscape felt as familiar to Starscream as the stripes on his own wings. There was the Polyhex Patch, a peculiar cryoscape where the permafrost had divided the ground up into innumerable tiny lakes shaped like squashed squares, kilted diamonds, trapezoids, and pentagons. The lakes were still frozen, but he knew that when summer came they would fill up with water and take on the look of a crystal aquagarden. It reminded him of home, and he liked to fly past it when travelling to the western side of the mountains.

The peaks had assumed recognizable shapes, and he given a few names: the mountain that rose above his valley camp was Mount Misery, while further into the chain was Downdraft Ridge, so named for the downdraft that had almost killed him there. The tallest mountain in the chain he called the Lonesome Peak. The white giant could be seen from hundreds of miles away on a clear day, and he used it to orient himself as he travelled.

To the east lay Seal Beach, the home of the colony he had spotted before. He had dubbed the seals "roly polies" for their chubby antics, and sometimes on his trips he would stop just to watch them lolloping across the beach and diving for clams. The roly polies didn't fear him, and if he sat down at the far edge of their beach and waited, they would come to investigate. He let them climb up on his legs and even dared to pet their bristly brown hides—though this they objected to. When he discovered they would eat meat—he found two of them tearing apart a squealing spotted seal—he began to bring them rotting dolphin carcasses and other carrion. _Next I'll be giving them names,_ he thought.

The Storm Zone, of course, was the most familiar patch of his territory. The mountain that rose above the zone was Shrieker Mountain, and Starscream had discovered that it was responsible for causing the storm. Under the right conditions, the cold, dense air at the top of the mountain would slide down the glaciated slopes like an avalanche of air. The resulting "shriekers" were predictable, and Starscream learned to avoid them. Every time he passed Shrieker Mountain he gave it a friendly laser blast.

His valley camp expanded. He added a shed to store his energon cubes, a chair with a comfortable back for his wings, a work table, and several subspace specimen boxes that he filled with shells, rocks, leaves, cones, bark, eggs, and small game. At first he was tempted to dissect the squirrel in the neighboring blob spruce, but he quickly became fond of the little tree rat. When he saw that it shucked the spruce cones to get at the seeds buried within, he drew up a blueprint for an automatic shucking machine and had the microfactory build it. After processing several trees through the device, he was able to gather enough seeds to fill a box which he set up by the squirrel's tree. Every time he visited his camp, he refilled the box and was treated to an earful of paranoid chattering.

"I'm the one feeding you," he protested, but it made no difference.

Despite the racket, the squirrel seemed to like the feeder. So did the local avian fauna. A host of tiny brown grey birds joined in at the trough, and Starscream would watch them as he prepared specimens for subspace. He talked to them as he worked, sharing his findings and asking them questions that they never answered. They made a poor substitute for Skyfire, but it was better than silence that would have otherwise dominated the valley.

Although he had initially dropped his scientific mission, he came to realize that if he didn't do something to occupy his mind while he flew, he would go insane. Yet he indulged in scientific pleasures only reluctantly. He tried telling himself that Skyfire would enjoy looking at this or that find, but in his mind hovered an image of a dead grey cargo jet splattered across a snowy gulch. When he found his fingers moving on autopilot and his mind straying down morbid paths, he would pack the specimen boxes away in the tent and go back out to search, cursing himself for wasted time.

As spring grew near, the hours of daylight slowly increased. Starscream soaked up every minute of it; he felt he would never take the sun for granted again. Around the coast the snow began to take on a wet, dirty look, though up in the mountains and in his shadowed valley it was still dry powder that blew about like sand whenever the wind was up. Finally the air began to turn warm and thin under his wings.

It shouldn't have come as a surprise when animals began showing up, yet somehow he was taken aback when the dead arctic landscape began to come alive. The whales were the first creatures to arrive: blue ones and gray ones, black ones and white ones, speckled and spotted and white-bellied ones. When he crossed the sea to visit the western continent, he would see them blowing and swarming in vast pods, their long bullet-shaped bodies moving slowly through the dark blue water. He was tempted to go underwater in his jet mode and swim with them, but experience had made him chary of large animals—it seemed that predators of any size had a peculiar taste for Seeker.

Soon the first birds began to trickle in: terns, geese, ducks, gulls, and cranes in flocks of hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands. Starscream was less than comfortable with this development; he did not fancy the thought of sucking one of the creatures into an intake. But there was nothing to be done about it, so he simply avoided the coastal rookeries as best he could.

The roly polies had entered their mating season. The big bulls would roar and slash at each other with their stubby tusks until blood flew. Starscream was horrified at the wounds they inflicted upon each other, but the creatures seemed oblivious to the pain in their mating madness. The bulls stopped eating and would no longer touch his offerings of meat—though the females partook eagerly. One old, pinkish bull finally established himself as Prime, and the rest of the bulls were banished to the far edge of the colony.

"There, there," Starscream told them. "I didn't do so well when I was young, either. Just you wait, someday you'll be Primes too."

A month after the rut, the females calved. Starscream felt as delighted as if he had fathered the babies himself. The calves were dark brown with smooth skin and a naive, wide eyed sort gaze as they stared with whiskered faces. The once-friendly mothers now regarded him with distrust, but the calves were constantly drawn to him. He would have loved to hold them and stroke their tiny heads, but the nervous females forbade this with panicky barks.

"Cut me a break, huh?" he said. "I'm a robot, I don't like meat. I'm just a metal plant; all I eat is sun. Slag, I couldn't eat your babies if I wanted to."

But the mothers merely stared at him suspiciously. One curious calf gave an _arp_.

"I wish you could talk," he said. "Here, perhaps I can communicate. Ahem. Arp, arp arp arp. Arp! Arp, arp, aaarp."

He waited. The calves stared at him in wonderment.

"No? Okay, maybe my accent needs work. I'll keep trying."

His head filled pictures of happy babies eating clams from his hand and muzzling his fingers with their bristly whiskers. But he would have to wait for that; right now they drank only the glandular secretions of their mothers.

* * *

A week later he spotted the whale. He was flying back to his camp from the eastern subcontinent he had dubbed "Birdland" when he saw it floating in the water. It was a monstrous grey-blue hulk, one of the largest he had seen yet. At first he thought it was sunning itself, but when he descended for a closer look he discovered that it was bloated and dead. Already pale crabs were scurrying over the scarred surface, while underneath a school of silver fish pecked at the carcass. Gulls swarmed above the floating buffet in a screaming cloud.

The roly polies could feast on it for a week. It would make a perfect Creation Day gift for the colony. The thought pleased him. He could make them a party, and this stinking, decomposing carcass would be the centerpiece of the celebration.

But how to get it back?

He transformed and hovered above the carcass, examining it from all angles. The flesh had not deteriorated to the point where it would rip easily. Could he tie a cable around the tail and drag the whole whale? After a moment of thought, he decided he could. But another problem presented itself: did he have enough energy?

He had been meaning to refuel for a few days, but some nasty weather had kept him grounded in Birdland longer than he expected. The energon cube he always carried with him had been used up two days ago, and now his tanks were getting low.

He considered going back to camp to refuel, but he was afraid that if he left the carcass unguarded it would be gone when he returned. He had seen carnivorous whales preying upon their small brethren, and the smell of the carcass would probably draw sharks like flies. But did he have enough energy to tow the whale back the whole way?

There was only one way to find out. He took a length of cable out of subspace and unwound it. He tied a noose in the end and descended until he hovered right above the chopping waves.

He had vaguely hoped that he would be able to slip the cord around the whale's flukes without getting wet in the process; however, once he saw the size of the beast's tail he realized he would have no choice. Grumbling to himself, he lowered himself into the cold water and swam underneath the half-sunken tail. With quick jerks of his arms, he began widening the loop of the noose.

Later he would realize that it was the jerking motion that had attracted the shark. One second he was contemplating the barnacle-spotted flukes hanging above, the next moment something impacted his back.

A hundred daggers dug into his wings. Pain tore through him with a crunch of shattering electronics. He screamed and tried to fly, but the daggers held tight. The next moment he was being jerked back and forth like a puppet.

Then the knives drew out. Past the oily, short-circuiting remains of his wings, Starscream saw a monstrous grey shape swirl past, its rock-hard flesh scraping against his leg. He gave a cry of horror and instinctively activated his antigravs. _Get o__ut of the water! Now! _

But something was wrong. Only one of his antigravs responded, and it was sluggish and weak. An ice cold feeling was spreading inside his chest. _Water_, he realized. And now he was sinking down, down, down, into the darkness. His thrusters, he had to use his thrusters. He flailed, trying to bring himself into an upright position.

That was a mistake. A shadow crossed the light of the surface and he caught a glimpse of a streamlined sillouette. The shark shot towards him.

"Get away!" Starscream shrieked.

Black eyes rolled up into white sockets. Jaws opened to reveal rows of serrated teeth. Too late, he thought to fire his laser cannons. Then the shark's jaws slammed closed on his legs. He howled and tried to kick free, but it was no use. The monster shook him till his knees splinted. He screamed. The water became full of oily bubbles.

Finally the shark released him. As it curved off, Starscream raised his cannon and blasted the beast in the side. The shark gave a startled jerk as the sleek skin erupted in a gout of bloodly flesh. Again Starscream fired, this time at the head. Meat ionized in a burst of steam. The shark's head vanished. The black-fringed tail stopped in midmotion and the decapitated corpse coasted slowly downwards on its own momentum. A river of blood followed behind like a ghastly contrail.

Trembling, Starscream lowered his arm. He realized an uncomfortable pressure was building up around his face and chest. The water was dark and cold. He looked up and was stunned to see the floating shape of the whale, far, far above.

He tried to ignite his thrusters, only to realize that he could no longer work his knees. The joints were destroyed, snapped by the shark's thrashing, and his thrusters flopped limply underneath his thighs. Desperately he turned on his remaining antigrav. Slowly, slowly he stopped his fall. Then, little by little, he rose back to the surface.

The ascent seemed to take forever. He constantly looked around, expecting at any moment for the shark's angry mate to attack, but the ocean remained silent. The bleeding carcass sank downwards, its sleek sillouette now a ruined mess.

At last he broke the surface. The wind on his face never felt so good. It was then that he realized he had a much more serious problem. He couldn't lift himself out of the water. The remaining antigrav could bear his weight, but only when he was submerged. He strained upwards, cursing desperately as he fought against gravity, only to fall back in again. He tried to ignite his thrusters, but only one of them would turn on, and it was uncontrollable. Thinking to transform, he tried to draw his legs up into his torso, but they would not retract.

Slowly it began to dawn on him that he was in trouble. He couldn't fly, couldn't float, couldn't even get out of the water. He was wounded and his body was filling with ocean. He was also running short on energon. The water was full of blood, and there could be more megasharks about.

He looked at the whale, still surrounded by screeching gulls. Perhaps he could climb on top; it was the only thing around that could get him out of the water. He swam towards it, fighting the waves that slapped his face and filled his intakes.

The whale's skin was visibly deteriorating and Starscream recoiled at the thought of touching it, but the thought of a second shark grabbing his legs and pulling him under swiftly overcame his objections. He dug his fingers into the barnacle infested flesh and began to draw himself up.

Halfway onto the carcass, the whale rolled over. Cursing, Starscream sank back into the sea. He would have to try a different approach. _The tail,_ he thought. He could work his way up from there. Pushing himself on his antigrav, he swam around to the massive flukes. He took a firm grip on the rotten flesh and dragged himself hand over hand up onto the belly. The tail sank under his weight, but the main bulk remained afloat.

At last he lay precariously upon the whale's distended stomach, his legs splayed over either side of the corpse and his face pressed into the stinking side. The whale was half submerged under his weight, and his hands and feet hung in the water. He was afraid to move. A gurgle of water flowed out of his shattered wings as they drained.

_I am so slagged_.


	6. Chapter 6

For awhile he simply lay there as still as he could. It seemed impossible that just moments ago he had been fine, yet now he was literally clinging to life. _Is this what happened to Skyfire?_

Slowly he dared to look himself over. His wings had been ripped to ribbons, but the rest of his body looked surprisingly intact. From the pain, he had assumed that it would be much worse, but all he saw were some nasty gouges in his paint. Even his knees were barely scarred, though the joints had snapped during the shaking. Whatever the shark's teeth were made of, it was less strong than his own metal. Even the tooth marks were smaller than he had envisioned—more like needles than daggers. The only real damage to his internals had been wrought by the water that had entered through his damaged wings and joints. Already his internal pumps were cleaning it up likeleaked oil or energon.

He looked around and sized up his situation. Land was nowhere to be seen, but he sent a quick radar pulse in the direction of the shore—243 miles away. Could he get there on his remaining antigrav? He did a few quick calculations; it would take too much energy. But what other choice did he have, besides clinging to the whale and drifting?

And where _was_ the whale drifting? He looked around, as though the answer were written somewhere in the water. Starscream had not studied the oceanic currents. Still, he should be able to tell which direction he was going in a few hours.

His thoughts turned back to the shark. It had been the largest predator he had seen on the planet yet, though not as large as the whale he rested upon. Were there more of them out there? Were they coming even now, drawn to the smell of their dying brother's blood?

"Why does everything want to eat me?" he muttered.

He wondered if he was safe on top of the whale. After a moment of contemplation he decided that he was—as long as the whale kept floating, and as long as he managed to stay on top of it. Every time a strong gust of wind blew, he felt the whale beginning to turnbeneath him. He was able to correct it with nudges of his remaining antigrav. Webbed gull feet walked over his back, and beaks rapped sharply at his armor. Tiny crabs explored the crevices of his body.

He realized he needed to reenergize while there was a little daylight left. Even a cloudy sky would be better than nothing. Slowly he stretched his arm down to the subspace at his side and retrieved the tin with the folded solarsheet inside. With a ginger motion, he unfolded it.

The wind snatched at the sheet, but Starscream held it tight by corner grommet. He spread it out across the whale's pitted back and held it there with one hand while he went through the slow,carefulprocess of retrieving the power cable. This he clipped to his chest. A moment later he felt the sheet begin to drip energon into his converter. Relief flooded him. Unless the clouds cleared up the sheet wouldn't be enough to keep him alive, but it would hold him long enough. Perhaps by that time his bloated raft would have beached itself. He tried to contact his tent and have it relay orders to the microfactory to begin building new parts, but there was no response. Silently he cursed the aurora.

Hours passed slowly by. Starscream pulsed the land every few minutes. It seemed he was approaching the shore from an oblique angle. If the present direction and speed continued, he would reach land in a little over a week. Of course, by that time the whale would probably have sunk, or else the sharks would tear it apart, or he would run out of energon. _What a stupid way to die_.

There was nothing to do but wait and watch for sharks. A small black one came up as evening approached, but Starscream killed it before it could get take a single bite. It wasn't the size of the shark that disturbed him so much as the idea of it ripping holes in his "raft" and letting the gases out.

As darkness fell, the wind picked up again. Starscream packed the solarsheet back into its container for the night and tried to rest. The crabs scurried over him with their tickling feet. Waves lapped at the whale's side, making it rock slowly. Occasionally something splashed in the distance. He listened, waiting for the vibration that would signal that a shark was going after the whale. The night was cloudy and dark. Every few hours, a particularly heavy wave would slam against the side of the whale and he would have to stabilize it again.

He was glad when dawn came. The wind was still up, and he was 52 miles closer to his goal. Thick clouds still hung across the sun, but he brought out the solarsheet anyway. At this point, every bit counted. He realized he needed to start thinking about how to conserve enough energy to last the trip. It would be suicide to shut down, but perhaps he could deactivate some of his other systems. He wasn't using his legs, and his transformation circuits were of no use. He turned off both. It was a strange, uneasy feeling, but it would save 12% of his fuel for the day. He examined the list of his remaining systems. His self repair system was eating up an inordinate amount of fuel in an attempt to fix his wings.

"Don't bother with that," he said. "Or my knees either. You'll never finish, and I need the energon now."

He turned both processes off. That left him with about a 30% savings. After some further thought, he managed to shave off another 8% by setting his remaining systems into varying states of inactivity.

"I'll make it another day, anyway," he said.

Two days passed, each like the other. During the day he collected what energon he could, and during the night he laid still and listened for sharks. He had to kill two more of the creatures, a long blue one and a bulbous-headed tan one. The whale held up nicely; he had worried that it would sink, but it seemed in no hurry to do so. To fill up the hours he tried to calculate its buoyancy, but in the end all he could say was that it was doing a remarkably good job of holding up a multi-ton Seeker.

It was on the third day that disaster struck. The wind had strengthened, but it was blowing at the wrong angle, forcing the whale sideways so it he was moving parallel to the coast instead of towards it. When he magnified he could see a thin blue strip of land in the distance, frustratingly close yet completely untouchable. He played with the idea of rigging a sail, but he had no material save for his solarsheet, and he was not eager to experiment with that.

He watched the sheet throughout the day, observing how the ripples played across the shiny black surface like waves across the ocean. Now it fluttered and flapped as the wind picked up; he could feel the air pulling at it with every gust. He kept one hand clenched around the grommet for fear that a sudden blast might rip it out from under his fingers.

A sleek black shape swam leisurely underneath the whale, then circled round for a closer inspection. Still gripping the sheet, he carefully raised his arm and fired the lowest power laser blast he could at the shark. Even this was a killing shot, and the creature sank in a red miasma.

The half-freed sheet was now flapping in the wind like a flag. Frowning, Starscream gathered it back in again. It occurred to him suddenly that if the shark had been as large as the one that had attacked him, a single good knock to the whale's side would dislodge his grip upon the solarsheet. It would be gone in a flash and that would mean a slow but certain death. Surely there must be a better way to secure it.

After a moment of thought, and some pining for the cable he lost to the shark, an idea occurred to him. He could slip the grommet around his finger, then subspace his fingertip and replace it with the atmospheric sampler. The little wings on the sampler would fold out into a T-shape and hold the grommet in place. _Perfect_.

He began pulling in the solarsheet. As he did so, a wave hit the whale broadside and the wind blew the half-loosed sheet into his face. The grommet slipped from his startled fingers. The next thing he knew the slippery material was sliding away. He clawed for it as the wind snatched it up, and felt the smooth surface against his fingertips—then it whooshed away.

"No!" he cried. He lunged for the flying black sheet, but it was already out of reach. Then the whale rolled and dumped him into the water with a splash. He hovered there, half-submerged, watching in horror as the sheet tumbled up into the sky. It did not come back down.

After awhile he climbed back onto the whale and lay there. Tomorrow he would burn up the last of his fuel, fall into the ocean, and die.


	7. Chapter 7

Starscream gazed out across the gray sea. _Stupid, stupid, stupid,_ he thought. _How could you be so stupid? _A crab poked at his optic with its tiny claws. He crushed it and hurled it away.

His mind circled round and round, looking desperately for an alternative to his impending death. He could not get to land—the whale wasn't even headed that direction anymore. He could not abandon the whale and float home; there was no energy to spare to run his remaining antigrav. No, there was no way out of it: he was going to die. And once he was gone, there would be no one left to save Skyfire.

The last fact that was the bitterest cut of all. His friend had been counting on him, and he, through his own stupidity, had sealed the other's death warrant.

For the rest of the day he just lay there, brooding as unrealistic plans swept through his mind. He watched the land recede a mile at a time; the wind had shifted fully, and the whale was now drifting north instead of south. _Why did this have to happen to me?_ he wondered. The only answer he could find was the one he already knew: exploration was a risky business. But he had not made it any safer by waiting to refuel until he was low. He realized that he had let himself become complaisant. He should have gone back before he ever had to use his reserve cube, before he even needed the extra fuel. It had made him feel better to run himself ragged, as though he were suffering with Skyfire somehow. Now it just seemed stupid and selfish. He imagined Skyfire frowning at him as if he had pulled some foolhardy stunt.

Starscream studied his fuel reserves and calculated that he had about thirteen hours before he shut down. It struck him as an incredible fact that he was only 124 years old, yet he was going to die. How could that be? How could the universe cheat him out of his most precious possession, his life, when he had barely used it? How unfair it all was!

Twilight fell, and the wave troughs filled with shadows. He had just 10 hours of existence left. _I have to __DO__ something,_ he thought. _Anything would be better than just lying here __I die__. _

Maybe if he listed all his resources, some idea would come of it. He looked around him, and listed,

"Sunset, sun." No that that did any good.

"Water." Wave action could provide kinetic energy, but he had no way to collect it.

"Crabs, gulls, barnacles, a dead whale." It would have been a rich bounty, if he had been an organic.

He turned to the contents of his subspaces.

"Tools." He had a excellent set of repair equipment, but most of it was meant to be powered by his own body. And what good would it do to repair himself when what he needed was energon?

"An energon converter." The device was meant as a backup for the solar panels, a simple means to convert heat and various chemical substances into energon. But there was nothing to convert out here but water and crabs.

"Hopeless," he said. "Dead. Rust in pieces. Game over. Free one way ticket to the crypt."

A crab raced towards his optics. He smashed his fist down on it with a crunch, sending a shockwave through the whale's rotting blubber.

A memory tickled the back of his mind. He paused, hesitant—he sensed an idea, but when he studied the memory he couldn't see the connection.

Once he and Skyfire had surveyed a planet inhabited by a race called the Nhgauurung, a quadrupedal species with a twin pair of dextrous prehensile trunks in place of arms. One of the coastal hunting tribes had chosen seals as a staple of choice for their winter diet. They lived in sealskin tents and wore clothing made of soft pupskin; they carved the bones into tools and the teeth into jewelry. Yet Starscream sensed that none of that was important. What was it? He remembered poking his head instead one of the hot, reeking tents and finding it dark—save for a puddle of fire flickering in a rough stone-hewn bowl. _A puddle of fire,_ he thought.

_ A puddle of fire!_

He slapped the whale's hard blubbery side again, making a ripple travel through the hide. _Seal b__lubber! _ That was what they used for their lamp oil—_energy rich fat!_ He was lying on top of an organic oil well.

He traded his index finger for a short, sharp knife and eagerly began to shave off slivers of the whale's blue-grey hide. A cautious part of him warned that if he cut too deep, he would pop whatever gaseous balloon was buoying the whale up. Reluctantly he forced himself to slow down. He only had 10 hours left to live, but that could be a lot shorter if he sank himself in his haste.

The rubbery hide soon gave way to a pale yellow substance. He retracted the knife and brought out his molecular probe. A quick touch revealed a bonded structure of carboxylic acid, organic alcohol, and glycerols. There was energy bottled up in those long, rich molecules. But could he convert it to energon?

With slow care he drew the energon converter out of subspace. While it couldn't blow away like the sheet had, he didn't fancy the thought of retrieving it from the bottom of the ocean. He set it down in front of him and opened the lid. Then he retrieved his knife and shaved off a thin slice of fat.

Now came the moment of truth. He dropped the slice in the converter.

"What do you make of that?" he asked, wiping his now-greasy fingers on the whale's barnacle-infested hide.

_Error: unrecognized substance. _

"Analyze it."

_Analyzing..._

Starscream tapped his fingers.

_Error: This substance __contains high levels of__ impurities. Please enter a new substance or repeat analysis. _

He frowned. Of course, he should have known that the fat was more than just fat. All the animals he had dissected thus far had been made out of cells fed by a network of capillaries. The whale fat would contain crumbling cell walls, dead bacteria, tiny blood vessels and who knew what other organic structures.

Suppose he burned the fat and simply collected the heat energy from i? He considered the idea for a moment, but then discarded it. The wind would blow most of the heat away, and he didn't want to waste this precious new resource.

"Can you purify the substance somehow?" he inquired.

_Impurities do not correspond to any known method of purification. Would you like to enter a new purification method now?_

"No," he growled. "What would happen if you converted it to energon now, with the impurities?"

_Level of impurities is above safety maximum._

"Yes, yes. But would happen if you did it anyway?"

_Level of impurities is above safety maximum. __To avoid energon contamination, adhere to the safety guidelines provided in the Conversia Rugged __301-Av __O__peration __M__anual._

"So in short you don't know," Starscream snapped. "Fine then, let's find out. Convert the substance to energon."

_Error: high levels of impurities detected. Please purify substance before continuing. _

"Just do it, you stupid computer."

Grudgingly it seemed, the energon converter began to work. The fat disappeared, pulled into an internal subspace, and a moment an energon cube materialized in its place. Starscream was surprised that it had gone so fast.

_ There was an error (1022) fulfilling your request. Please consult the Conversia Rugged 301-Av Maintenance Manual._

"Yeah, whatever."

He reached inside and took out the tiny cube, holding it between his fingertips. At any other time the thought of drinking energon made from a rotting alien corpse would have repulsed him; but right now he was too empty to care. He drew the cube up to his optics for a closer look.

His newfound appetite vanished. There were little specks floating inside the orange-tinted fluid, and a stringy, mucacious strand clung to the corner. As he swirled the liquid, a layer of debris on the bottom stirred.

"Uuuuggglllleaah! This is _not_ going in my fuel tanks."

The machine had to be able to do better than that. He set the cube back in the converter.

"Purify this energon."

_Error: __Filter __problem__. P__lease change filter __before continuing. To replace the filter,__see__p. 101 – 113 of __the Conversia Rugged 301-Av Maintenance Manual. __To buy a new filter, visit the Conversia __net__node at __Cy~IAC-store-Conversia__ or contact support at..._

"The filter?"Starscream interrupted. His mind flashed across the waves to his little red tent, and the microfactory that lay inside. That was where new filters came from. "What's wrong with the filter?"

_Particulate levels exceeded; recommend replacement. _

"Ignore the filter and purify the energon."

The cube vanished and was immediately replaced again. He examined it. The mucus strand was gone, but there was still silt on the bottom and floating specks. He shuddered.

Setting down the energon, he considered his options. Option one was easy if horrifying: he could simply drink the energon and let his body sort out the contamination as best it could. This struck him as a singularly bad idea. Or, there was option two: he could try burning the blubber and converting the resultant heat into energon.

"Option two it is," he said.

He subspaced the tiny energon cube and shaved off another slice of fat. As he did so, he found that the tip of his knife was cutting into meat; the blubber was a mere foot thick. He frowned; he had hoped for more. Still, it was better than nothing. Maybe the fat would be thicker elsewhere.

He flicked a thin slice of blubber up onto the whale's skin and exchanged his knife for a blow torch.

"Here goes nothing." Turning it on, he directed the hot blue flame at the "fuel."

Flames quickly began to crackle up from the blubber. It sizzled and popped, and he could smell a fishy, frying odor that he long associated with organic cooking. Thick, oily black smoke began to roll off the blubber, dispersing as the wind whipped it away. He reached for the converter and shifted it so that the thermal siphon on the side was poised over the tiny fire.

"Let's have some energon," he said.

_Thermal energy detected. Commencing conversion..._

He waited, and waited, and waited. A cube appeared, but it was empty. A minute passed, and finally a faint pinkish light appeared in one of the corners. _O__h __great__,_ he thought. He had been right when he had guessed that burning the fat was a lot less efficient than direct conversion.

Impatiently he set the converter aside and began shaving off more fat. He added it to the burning pile until the flames reached a respectable level, then moved the converter back. The energon seemed to accumulate a little faster, or maybe he was just imagining it.

He waited. An hour passed. Darkness had come, and his little fire was the only the light that could be seen. Orange glimmers danced on the waves. The wind played with the flames, tossing them one way, then the next. He knew that only half the fire's heat (if that) was actually reaching the converter, though he had moved it as close as possible and was hold it directly over the blaze. The smoke got in his optics and covered them with a dirty black film that he wiped away with his clean hand.

The blubber burned slowly, and it took no less than three hours for the flames to fill theenergon energon cube. The small cube was pure and pink, but when he drank it, the change to his fuel level was negligible.

"Well, that should give me whole 'nother hour of operation. Joy, oh joy," he said. At this rate he would starve to death.

He brought out the orangish energon cube and examined it again. It looked every bit as nauseating as before. But how bad would it actually be? He knew a bit about the consequences of energon contamination, but the effects were as diverse as the contaminants. Some substances could be filtered out, while others would float on top of the energon or sink to the bottom, falling into sipper or the sump drain, respectively. He suspected the silt on the bottom would settleinto his sump drain without giving much trouble, but the floating specks were another matter. They hadn't seemed to be affected by the converter's filter at all—in fact, they (or perhaps the mucus strand) had clogged the filter after one use.

"Well," he said reflectively. He looked down at the tiny cube. Heat conversion was too slow; he had no spare filter; and there was nothing to eat but whale.

He steeled himself, and slowly raised the cube to his lips.

"Here's to Starscream. May he have a long and happy life."

He drained it.


	8. Chapter 8

_I've actually eaten whale before at a potluck. The "muktuk" was served in neat cubes with black hide on one side and blubber on the other. I can no longer remember the taste, but I do remember what it felt like to bite into the hide. It was exactly what you would expect a gnawing on a tire to feel like. :P _

* * *

It was the worst thing he had ever tasted. The valve at the back of his mouth closed off the instant the foul liquid touched his sensors; all his instincts told him to purge it at once. He clenched his hand over his mouth to keep himself from spewing it out involuntarily.

For a few long moments, he warred with his body's better judgment. _C'mon, pump it down. Drink or die. Get it over with!_ Finally he summoned up the willpower to open the valve. The energon went down.

A few minutes passed without ill effects. At first, Starscream entertained some tentative hopes that perhaps he had been wrong about the energon. It was shortly thereafter that the first symptoms began to manifest. A bloated, overfull sensation developed in his filters, and his fuel lines felt...wrong...in some indescribable way. His sump drain was drawing out particulates, but it was apparently not catching all of them.

He waited for another hour to see what else would happen, but the symptoms grew neither better nor worse. _Looks like that's all,_ he thought. _Now to see what happens when I drink __two__ dozen of these._

As the dark waves lapped against the side of the whale and the wind hissed through his tattered wings, he took out the little knife and began to flay. Slowly the converter filled with little shreds of fat. The process was tedious, and it was made even slower by the fact that Starscream was afraid to cut too deeply for fear of poking a hole in his raft. His hands grew slimy with grease and congealed blood. The crabs crawling hungrily over the wounds he opened.

At last he had collected enough blubber to fill the converter. With a grimace, he ordered the machine to convert it. It protested, but obeyed.

This time around the energon was a deep orange color, almost brown. Mucus strands clung thickly to the sides, and the bottom was dark with scum. He tried purifying it, but this time nothing seemed to happen. Starscream stared at the cube, trying to think of any alternative to drinking it, but no ideas came.

Finally, the ticking timer that warned of his impending shut down forced his hand. He turned off his optics, locked the valve at the back of his mouth open, and pumped the cube down. When he closed the valve again, he found it was coated with mucus. A shudder of revulsion went through him and he flicked it on and off until the mucus fell away—into his tank. Yet despite his horror he felt a deep relief as his tank filled up. Another few days of life had been granted to him.

It wasn't long before he felt the side effects. His filters erupted in splitting agony and a horrible, thick pressure began to build up inside of him. Unprompted, his self repair system kicked in and flooded his lines with repair nanites. He silently urged them on. He could almost feel the mucus sticking to the sides of his tanks, clogging up his valves, plugging up the channels. _Purge, purge!_ all his instincts screamed. He clung to the whale and whimpered curses.

When the pain did not abate, he turned it off so that he could think. His repair sensors kept him updated with a rolling feed of damages that continued to build. _Th__at__slagging __energon was worse than the shark,_ he thought.

Now that he wasn't going to die—hopefully—he needed a new plan. The whale was no longer headed where he wanted; in fact, it was getting farther and farther from his camp every day. Since he had energon now, it was possible to abandon the whale and proceed on his remaining antigrav. It might take him a long time to reach the shore, but at least he wouldn't be drifting aimlessly across the ocean towards nowhere. On the other hand, was it really wise to abandon his floating island in his current condition? If he suffered a malfunction en route, or the antigrav failed for some reason...

There was still plenty of whale blubber left. He could easily stay for another week or two, provided that the corpse continued to float. Perhaps he could take a few days to repair himself as best he could, then attempt the crossing. Yet every moment he waited, the whale moved further away from shore. And who knew what the long term effects of the energon would be? It might be better to go soon, before the damage got worse. On the other hand, the wind might change back to a favorable course at any time.

After several hours of deliberation, dawn came. Starscream could again see the thin strip of blue that marked the coastline, and with that tantalizing sight came an urgent desire to reach it. It would be about a day's journey, depending on whether the currents helped or opposed him.

He looked at the waves that broke against the whale's blue-grey hide and wondered if he dared to brave them. There could be more sharks under there, or even worse things that he didn't know about. He would be exposing his broken body to cold, briny water, and though he believed he had closed off the leaks, he wasn't eager to test the repairs.

He drew up the schematics for the sole working antigrav, the upper left one in his back. The seawater had caused short outs and crippled more than half of the GPC motivators. Repair estimate: two days. He could wait that long. If he devoted all of his newly gained energy to the task of repair, he would stand a far better chance of weathering the journey.

The shoreline was tempting with its promises of a dry, clean tent and as much pure energon as he wanted, but he deliberately looked away. This time he was going to play it safe. Skyfire's life depended on the decisions he made, and while he might have gambled with his own existence, he wasn't going to risk his friend's life.

He laid his head down on the whale's side and tried to rest.

* * *

Two days passed slowly, and the whale drifted north. To pass the time, he flayed its back and down its sides, filling another two cubes. He was pleased to have his subspaces full of energon—even toxic energon—and his hopes rose. The contamination damage had stabilized, and he turned back on his inner sensor feeds, for it was disconcerting not to have any feeling in his internals. The sharp pains were gone, but in their place was a dirty, sickly feeling that made Starscream feel like he needed to run a bottlebrush through all his lines. His thoughts turned to the cartridge full of engine cleaner in the box in his tent. In his mind, he raised the bottle to his lips and drank the entire thing in a single, long chug of cleansing acidic bliss. Yes, that was what he would do as soon as he got back.

The GPC motivators came back online one by one and he watched with satisfaction. Already it was easier to hold himself in place on the rocking whale. At last, after two days most of the less-damaged GPCs registered as functional. He tried to levitate himself in place, and when he found he could lift his entire upper body up for almost ten minutes before his antigrav began to overheat, he knew he was ready. _Tomorrow,_ he thought, _at first light. _

When dawn began to turn the black sky to a cloudy grey, he hesitated. Should he try to collect one last energon cube? Was it really wise to throw himself back into the shark-infested water? Was he deluding himself that he was ready in his eagerness to return to camp? Once he had deserted the whale, he would never be able to find it again.

For awhile he peered over the whale's side into the dark water. He scanned the sea for sharks, but saw nothing. _Alright, I have start sometime,_ he thought. _I might as well make the best of daylight. It's now or never. You don't want to wait another day do you? _

Reluctantly, he activated his antigrav and half-rose, half-rolled off the side of the whale.

"See you later," he said to his grotesque craft. "Thanks for the help, but I guess I can manage on my own now. Sorry that you're...still dead."

_Now I'm talking to dead __things__, _he thought. "That's just disturbing."

He turned his face to the south and headed towards land.

* * *

The journey was tense yet tedious. His systems began to complain the moment the whale was out of sight, and the threat of a malfunction hung over him like an axe. The pace was excruciatingly slow, for he did not dare to stress the antigrav more than it already was. Unable to take to the air for any length of time, he spent most of the trip lying face down in the water in a mimicry of flying, his optics staring into the depths as he scanned for sharks. Waves sloshed over his wings and rocked him up and down, up and down. Every hour, he lifted his face above the waves and took a sighting on the land. There was a peninsula sticking out a little ways from the shoreline, and he directed himself towards it.

As the water began to grow shallower, his confidence returned. Beyond some invisible boundary a lush forest of seaweed grew, and the alien beauty of the underwater world made him forget his worries. The green-brown "trees" were continually in motion, their thick ropelike stems straining against the pull of the current. Little brown furred animals stared at him curiously as he passed. Bright orange fish flitted among the leaves, and snails slowed dined their way across the vegetal buffet.

Starscream snatched at the thick, rubbery leaves as he passed and subspaced them for his sample box. Too late he realized that he should have taken a sample of the whale's flesh. _Oh well, there's probably plenty in my __lines__,_ he thought. What would Skyfire think when he heard about this? _He'll probably think I'm __crazy__, _Starscream thought.

The approaching shoreline began to assume definite characteristics. When he magnified he could see beaches, rocky bluffs, and even a fringe on top that might have been grass or trees. _Soon, soon,_ he thought, urging his antigrav on. The peninsula was growing closer, a finger of sand poking out into the water.

Then it was in swimming range. He put on a last burst of energy, rose half out of the water, and made for it. The waves crashed against his back, thrusting him forwards. With a last push of the surf, he found himself lying on the sand.

With a cry of relief, he crawled up on to the sand, his broken knees aching at each movement, and sat down. The surf hissed up over his feet and fell back again. His body suddenly felt heavy and weak.

_I'm alive,_ he thought, staring out across the ocean. _I did it. _He laid back on the sand and luxuriated in the firm, steady ground. _I __made__it, I'm back._He would be alright now; he just had to make it to camp, and he could enjoy all the comforts of home and feed Chatterjaw and the birds. They must be eagerly waiting for him. _I hope they're not__ worried about me,_ he thought.

He had to weld his knees in place so he could walk—in a manner of speaking. It took the help of his antigravs just to stand up, and then he staggered awkwardly down the peninsula, swaying clumsily from side to side with each step. He felt like a rust-monster from a cheesy movie, all stuck joints and broken wings.

When he reached the edge of the blob spruce forest, he made himself two canes out of the biggest spruce he could find. Yet even that couldn't make up for his unbending knee joints. Hills and gullies were a nightmare, and for particularly steep slopes he had no choice but to crawl up on his elbows. Again and again he tripped and sprawled over, only to rise cursing and fumbling at the trees he had crushed beneath him. Sap clung to his scratched paint, and bark and dead moss clung to the sap. He had sand in his finger joints. The low grade whale energon left him feeling tired, and the sickly, lingering effects of the contamination seemed to increase with every step.

It took him three days to reach the northern edge of the mountains. The trees had begun to thin out, but the footing was so awkward that he could barely make any progress at all. He was forced to make detours around steep places, and as the hills grew higher his course seemed to grow longer and longer. Finally he gave up and made a beeline straight for his camp. Then he was forced to half-float, half-crawl his way up the foothills. At the top of each hill he would lay exhausted, his strained antigrav throwing off waves of heat. He had never realized how far away from the coast his camp truly was. It had seemed but a short hop before, yet now the distance seemed all but insurmountable. As he fought his way up gullies, through stands of trees, and over endless hills, his frustrated curses turned to miserable noises that he would have been ashamed to let Skyfire hear.

The antigrav died only thirty miles from camp. He tried to bring it back online, but the continual heat and stress had finally cooked the damaged circuity beyond recovery. The hill was too rough to navigate, even with his canes. He laid them aside and unsealed the welds on his knees so that they could bend again. The rest of the trip was made on all fours.

When the camp finally came in view, a wretched laugh burst from his lips. He scrabbled his way up to the tent, giggling hysterically as he crawled past the worktable and fumbled open the flap.

"I'm back, I'm back, I'm back," he repeated as he crawled inside. The familiar ruddy walls had never looked so good. He sat there, quivering with relief as he drank in his surroundings. _Safe! _ He was safe now, and all was well. His optics fell on the microfactory.

With a thought he turned it on and sent it a list of parts to make. It began to hum and whir. The arms within flashed along preprogrammed courses, cutting, extruding, grinding and drilling with computerized precision.

Then the sickly sensations in his fuel lines took on monstrous proportions. The nausea which had hovered at the back of his mind came up full force, and he crawled hastily out of the tent and purged his tanks beneath the work table.

Wiping his lips with a trembling hand, he headed to the energon shed and seized a brilliant pink-white cube of high grade. He pressed it to his lips and drank, and drank, and drank. Afterwards, slightly overenergized, he picked his way back to the tent and shut the flap behind him.

He opened up the cartridge of engine cleaner. There was a measurement spoon that he would normally have used to get the correct amount, but this time he raised the cartridge straight to his mouth and sucked down the liquid as it came out of subspace. He took more than he should have, for his lines began to burn as the acidic cleanser spread throughout his body. _Burn, burn,_ he thought. _Burn it all up! _It was the best pain he had ever felt.

Starscream grabbed the remaining bag of energon goodies from where he had hidden it from himself and ate them all. When he had finished them, he drew his aching knees up to his chest and laid back on the floor. There was nothing in the world that could move him from that spot. He was just going to lie there and rest for a week—a month—a year. He was so slagging tired.

_It's spring,_ he thought. _I'll find Skyfire soon, and this nightmare will be over. _


	9. Chapter 9

Starscream spent almost two weeks recovering from the damage the shark and whale had wrought together. He lay face down in the tent, his knees scrunched up awkwardly beneath him as the microfactory worked on the broken antigravs in this back. Next came his shredded wings and snapped joints. The days were filled with whirring of dextrous mechanical arms, the burning of molten metal as damaged pieces were cut off, and the snip of wires. Finger-sized drones spawned by the factory crawled over and through his body. His access panels lay in a pile in the corner.

Under ordinary circumstances he would have chaffed at the inactivity, but now it came as a relief. Even movement seemed like too much of an effort. The sample cases lay untouched in the corner. He would crawl outside only to purge energon or fill Chatterjaw's feeder, then return to the tent and lay down again.

He was exhausted, not just in body but in mind. The urge to work had always come upon him in fits; he would drive himself mercilessly until a project was complete, then crash for weeks. Skyfire, who knew his habits better than anyone, had moderated the cycle enough to prevent the final stage of burnout, but Skyfire was not there anymore. Without the influence of his friend, Starscream had returned to the habits that came naturally, and now he was paying the price. Five months of nonstop worry, five months of flying the search grid (or rebuking himself for not flying it) day and night had ground him down to zero. Now that he had an excuse to rest, all desire to search or even think about searching had left him—though the guilt remained, whispering in his audios.

Starscream had plenty of time to contemplate what he had accomplished over the last several months. He could not help but see it in a new, unfavorable light. Whereas before his mad dashes through the mountains had seemed necessary, now they seemed almost deranged. It was only sheer luck that he had not come to a disastrous end much sooner, and in doing so ended Skyfire's chances of rescue. Whenever he brooded on his carelessness it made him angry at himself for hours.

He could not quite get rid of the sensation that there was whale gunk floating around inside him, _sticking_ to his lines. Every morning he went through the ritual of purging his tanks and refilling them with fresh energon. Then he would take a sip (or five) of engine cleaner to decontaminate himself. It was unhealthy to drink so much engine cleaner, but he didn't care. He revelled in the sensation of purifying fire.

When at last he emerged from tent, more or less repaired, it was to a bright spring sun and warm wind on his wings. The snow crunched wetly under his feet. There was the sound of dripping and the twittering of the newly arrived birds at the feeder.

Perhaps it was the coming of spring as much as the enforced rest that restored his spirits at last. He saw that the worktable was covered with a foot of snow and cleared it off. Then he took most of the boxes out of the tent and cleaned. He had bled on the floor, and there were bits of debris and electronic trash scattered everywhere. With newfound disgust he gathered it all into a pile and subspaced it in one of the specimen cases under the label, "Remains of a Seeker." When he found the ability to laugh at his joke, he knew he was feeling better.

After scrubbing the floor till the stains were muted, he turned his attention to himself. He had not touched his paint since the accident, save to scrub obsessively at the dried bits of whale that clung insistently to his exostructure. (He was certain that there was more hiding where he could not reach.) There were scratches left by the shark's teeth, and everything seemed to have a faintly oily feel, which could be due either to the whale fat or to the oil that leaked over him during repairs.

He decided to give himself a full cleansing and repaint. Taking out a cartridge containing his preferred "Acid Rain" brand of cleanser/stripper, he filled up the tank of a small flying maintenance drone. After snapping a spritzer attachment into the drone's tool socket, he went outside and stood with his arms outstetched as the drone went over him.

Soon every inch of his body was bubbling and hissing with the sounds of dissolving grease, whale, and paint. He gave a luxurious sigh and basked in the smell of cleaning chemicals. Chatterjaw watched him from his tree, giving an occasional suspicious chitter.

Starscream let the treatment go on much longer than was necessary. By the time he was done, the snow around him had melted and he was standing in a puddle of silver-purple mud. He stomped around in the snow until his feet were clean, then lay down in a drift and stared up into the blue sky. For the first time in months he felt like himself again.

It took the rest of the day to finish the process of sanding out his scratches, painting, and polishing. He couldn't resist choosing a high gloss "wet" finish, though he knew from experience that it would be gone after a month of operation. The sight of his fresh, gleaming paint reflecting the trees and mountains was refreshing at a soul-deep level. He felt like a new mechanism, a new, shiny, clean mechanism who had not devoured a corpse. To celebrate, he drank a few sips of engine cleaner.

That night, he gave himself a little party. He put on music, the first he had listened to in weeks, and refined three batches of energon goodies, each one filled with a different tasty additive. Then, unfurling a recharge mat that he was seldom around long enough to use, he sat down and let the soothing energy currents wash over his frame. When he had sat there for awhile, feeling warm and comfortable and even spoiled, he began to review his plans for the future.

He opened the map of his winter labors. It had been weeks since he had reviewed it last, and now he saw it with new optics. With the gloss of familiarity gone, he could see for the first time how patchy and inconsistent his searches had been. He had done a little here and a little, never sticking to a particular area for long for fear of missing a more promising spot. Some areas had been surveyed with one type of sensor setting and others with different settings, but he had not marked which setting he had used for which areas. There were even entire strips of landscape that he remembered surveying but had not marked on the map.

How shoddy and careless it all looked. _But no more,_ he decided. From now on, he was going to be methodical and systematic. He would record everything—every square mile covered, every sensor setting, every false positive, every hazard. He would also start keeping data on how the search had been conducted. It was important to note the altitude he had flown and the date on which he had surveyed each area so that he could integrate his images into the orbital maps he would make when summer came. He would also need to develop a form for recording his data so that he could subject it to computerized analysis.

Now that the task of finding Skyfire had been broken down into the familiar shape of a scientific project, Starscream felt his confidence grow. There would be no more blind, panicked groping. Instead, he would plan out which areas he wanted to survey and estimate how long each one would take. From there, he could draw up a timetable and track his progress towards the goal.

Over the course of the next few days he planned out his summer. The first thing he did was to code 283's terrain into search difficulty levels.

0 – Extreme weather, hazards

1 – Mountains, ocean

2 – Hills, forested areas, lakes

3 – Plains, desert, tundra

It was not exactly comforting to observe how much of the arctic fell into categories 0, 1 and 2, but Starscream's confidence was riding too high for discouragement. He contemplated the areas on the map that he intended to search. The northern part of the continent would get him off to a good start, but that would consume the entire summer. On the other hand, if he wanted to search along a pole-to-pole strip in the hopes that Skyfire had decided to finish the transit, he would spend the entire summer occupied with that.

At first he was vexed at having to choose between the two choices, but in the end he decided to search the arctic while the snow was gone. The equator could be surveyed at any time, and the antarctic pole would be in full winter darkness during the arctic's long summer days.

Satisfied by his reasoning, Starscream divided the arctic up into a grid and estimated how long each square would take to cover based on its difficulty code. The total time it would take was a little longer than he could hope to finish in a single summer; however, he could make it if he hurried.

One last decision he made was to begin compiling scientific data on the terrain below. Although it might not be directly helpful in finding Skyfire, it never hurt to know more about the environment. Perhaps some fact would unlock an idea he had overlooked or provide insight into Skyfire's disappearance. The aurora might not be the only surprise the planet was hiding.

Once his plan was in place, Starscream's doubts disappeared. He would find Skyfire now. It was only a matter of time, patience, and persistence.


	10. Chapter 10

Starscream felt glad to get back into the air again. He was already wondering what the roly polies had done in his absence, and if the snow was melting in Polyhex Patch. Already could feel the changes in the air as spring advanced. On southern slopes the snow was thin and patches of brown had appeared beneath trees and on the sun-warmed sides of rocks. The air was growing warm and thin under his wings, and the winds had shifted as the landscape adjusted to the new season.

The roly polies seemed surprised to see him. Starscream sat down on a water-polished at the far end of beach and waited for them to come over. When an audience of curious whiskered faces had gathered, he began,

"You'll never guess what happened to me."

The calves had grown in his absence. He rested a hand palm up on the ground and waited patiently till an inquisitive female climbed on. Lifting his hand briefly, he weighed her.

"Calves have gained about 50 pounds in weight. Length has increased by half a foot. Coloration is become lightening. Juveniles continue to nurse."

The calf squirmed off his hand and retreated to the far edge of the circle. If he was ever going to tame them, he was going to have spend more time at the colony. But that, he thought reluctantly, was simply not possible if he wanted to finish surveying the arctic by winter.

He was surprised at how much it cheered him up to be around the seals again. Even if they couldn't talk, they were good listeners and familiar faces. He liked the bustling life of the colony; the constant cacophony of grunts and barks; the pounding of the tide; and the screeches of the seabirds circling overhead. And most of all he liked being recognized and noticed. It was impossible to feel lonely when he was with the seals.

Over the course of the morning he visited all the familiar landmarks. He blasted a new hole in Shrieker Mountain and was pleased when it triggered a small avalanche that cascaded down the mountain in a white plume. Polyhex Patch's network of angular lakes was still frozen to the bottom. He landed on one of them and tried to skate on the edges of his feet, but without success.

"There's too much snow," he complained, scraping it away to make a little clear spot. He balanced there on tip-toe and attempted a pirouette, which ended with him flat on his rear.

"Ever graceful, the Seeker picked himself and returned to his rightful element," Starscream said wryly. He leapt back into the sky.

Satisfied that he was up to date on the local business, he made his way to the far northeastern corner of the continent. At Search Grid Unit 1-1, he stopped and began to fly back and forth, back and forth, scanning the ground for a familiar hollow metal signature.

* * *

The weeks passed, and spring arrived for real. Now the hours of daylight stretched on and on. The snow clouds were replaced by inkyrainclouds, and Starscream enjoyed the sensation of water lashing over his fuselage.

As the snow vanished, he could see at last the true colors of the landscape. Streaks of brown and green appeared; the icy lakes filled with brilliant blue water. The rugged, lichen crusted shapes of rocks began to reveal the outlines of ridges and slopes. Only the mountains still clung to their snow, forming a brilliant white line across the landscape.

The sky positively swarmed with birds. They hopped and waddled across the newly exposed ground, piping and kreeling and chirping and cawing and honking and scratching. They came in every color and size, from tiny things like insects to giant seabirds with wings half the size of his own. The latter group made him nervous for fear that he might hit one by mistake. But they were distinctive with their bright red bills, black heads, and long blue-grey wings, and as long as the sky was clear he could watch for them.

As the ground cleared, it filled quickly with new greens. There were ragged shoots of grass popping up amongst the dead tangle of last year's growth. Sodden humps of green moss protruded from the snow. Fuzzy grey buds appeared on the willows that lined the streams and meadows. Finally tiny flowers had erupted from the brown dead landscape in clumps of purple, yellow and white.

Each pond and puddle filled with squirming larvae. Before long insects emerged as if from nowhere, and soon the air was full of flies, moths, gnats, orange-winged butterflies, whining mosquitoes, dragonflies and bees. As soon as darkness began to fall, it seemed as thought all of the insects in the world headed straight for his optics. The gnats in particular thronged his optics so thickly that when he tried to brush them away, it left black smears. He quickly learned to dim his optics when the light vanished.

And then, when the ground was almost bare of snow, the most wonderful thing of all happened: the trees leafed out. It came slowly, as a barely visible mist of pale green. Then the green thickened, and all at once the world became intensely and completely _green_. Gone was the endless, blank whiteness, gone was the pale, sterile landscape. Starscream's spirits soared. He was going to find Skyfire this summer, he could feel it. The days fled by as he raced back and forth across the grid.

But as he soon discovered, spring had an ugly underside. Not all the snow melted right away. Sheltered behind rocks or on the sloping sides of high hills, the snow stayed on, stubbornly resisting the efforts of the sun. Whenever Starscream saw one, his mind said, _Skyfire!_ and an involuntary lurch of hope jolted through his system. He rebuked himself each time, yet he could not help himself. He wanted the blobs of snow to be Skyfire. Even he knew they were snow, he looked at them anyway. They formed shapes like "Skyfire with his legs torn off," or "Skyfire broken into two halves with his arms clenched around his midsection in agony." Starscream could not stop himself from envisioning the gruesome scene. Though he flung himself across the skies without rest, he fretted constantly at the slowness of his progress.

It was not until he started the systematic mile by mile survey that he truly began to comprehend the scale of the task he had undertaken. He would be covering over a million square miles, documenting potentially tens of thousands of hazards and maybe-probably false positives. His wings would take him over billions of trees and untold ocean waves. There would be mountain ranges with thousands of peaks that he would search one by one. There would be an uncountable multitude of islands. And somehow, _somehow_, he had to accomplish it in a single summer—though he was becoming more and more doubtful that he would make it in time.

His other projects advanced as well. With the help of the microfactory, he constructed thirteen solar satellites, each no bigger than his hand, and placed them in orbit around the planet. He reviewed the data they relayed on a daily basis, searching for a distinctive white-red patch or better yet, a hard, metallic radar blip. There were a disheartening amount of white patches, but no red. He investigated a few of the more promising radar blips, but as he had feared, they were merely iron or copper rich boulders covered in snow. Glumly he added them to his map.

He also followed through on his resolution to examine the planet scientifically. Since there was little to do on his search besides the unbroken daily routine of studying the ground, he took advantage of the time to research. He noted where the birds had their colonies and studied the migration patterns of the whales. Once he observed a sabertoothed cat talking a trihorned deer. More mundane yet more challenging were his geological studies. His maps filled with strike/dip symbols and dashed, dotted and toothed lines to indicate thrust faults, normal faults, strike-slip faults, unconformities, synclines, anticlines, plate boundaries, stratigraphic layers, volcanic sills, dikes, and more. Nor did he limit his studies to rocks. He measured vegetal density, estimated precipitation and took readings on temperature, humidity and dew point.

Yet though he studied everything, he did so in only in a cursory fashion. No matter how interesting a feature was, he could neither stop nor deviate from his survey line. He studied what appeared before him on the horizon and watched it until it disappeared behind his tailfins. It was like having a continuous banquet of knowledge, and yet being allowed to taste only a single sip from each cube.

Summer came swifly upon the heels of spring, and with it endless daylight. Though the sun disappeared below the horizon at "night," the sky remained blue and the stars were nowhere to be seen. The moon was a pale spectre of its former self. It shared the sky with the sun, and Starscream often flew with the sun at one wingtip and the moon at the other.

The young roly polies grew plump on their mother's milk. The urgency of Starscream's mission prevented him from visiting the colony as often as he would have liked, but when he passed overhead he would dip his wings to say hello. Sometime he thought how pleasant it would be to turn himself into a seal and lie there amongst that closely packed mass of bodies, sunning himself and enjoying the loud companionship of his friends. _They have such simple lives,_ he thought.

The endless days and the constant buzz and thrum of life were like a drug. Where before it had been panic that drove Starscream on, now it was the season of life itself. All the creatures who shared the planet with him were eating, mating, fighting and calving. It was the season of _now_, and it demanded to be taken advantage of before the sunlight slipped away and the cold, cruel night fell once again.

Starscream had been certain that he would find Skyfire during the summer, and as the bright months flowed by he forced himself to keep believing. Though he was done with only half of the first range of mountains, and though he had only managed to survey one half of the ground he had set out to cover, he knew—_he was certain!_—that Skyfire would appear before winter set in. It was unthinkable to spend another winter alone in his tent while Skyfire lay wounded somewhere under a white shroud of snow.

He raced down the search lines, trying to catch up with the goals that had slipped away from him. Or was it the summer that slipped away from him? It had been shorter than he had thought. He would have to hurry now, he told himself, have to wrap it all up fast. Skyfire would appear at any day, any week. Starscream would tenderly care for his wounds and spread out a tent to protect his friend from wind and rain. Soon they would be together again, the big white cargo jet and the little silver Seeker. They would talk and talk, and Starscream would relate all his adventures. Skyfire would listen, and laugh, and perhaps chide him gently for taking so long to find him.

Yes, he would find Skyfire any day now. The summer would last. He was making up for lost time. Soon he would find Skyfire.

The leaves began to turn yellow.


	11. Chapter 11

Starscream felt glad to get back into the air again. He was already wondering what the roly polies had done in his absence, and if the lakes had melted in Polyhex Patch. Already he could feel the changes in the air as spring advanced. On southern slopes the snow was thin and patches of brown had emerged beneath trees and on the sun-warmed faces of rocks. The air was growing thin and humid under his wings, and the winds had shifted as the landscape adjusted to the new season.

The roly polies seemed surprised to see him. Starscream sat down on a water-polished shelf at the far end of beach and waited for them to come over. When an audience of curious whiskered faces had gathered, he began,

"You'll never guess what happened to me." He related his tale.

The calves had grown in his absence. He rested a hand palm up on the ground and waited patiently till an inquisitive female climbed on. Lifting her briefly, he took her weight.

"Calves have gained about 50 pounds. Length has increased by half a foot. Coloration is lightening. Juveniles continue to nurse."

The calf squirmed off his palm and retreated to the far edge of the circle. If he was going to tame them, he would have to spend more time at the colony. But that, he thought reluctantly, was simply not possible if he wanted to finish surveying the arctic by winter.

He was surprised at how much it cheered him up to be around the seals again. Even if they couldn't talk, they were good listeners and familiar faces. He liked the bustling life of the colony; the constant cacophony of grunts and barks; the pounding of the tide; and the screeches of the seabirds circling overhead. And most of all he liked being recognized and noticed. It was impossible to feel lonely when he was with the roly polies.

Over the course of the morning he visited all the familiar landmarks. He blasted a new hole in Shrieker Mountain and was pleased when it triggered a small avalanche that cascaded down the mountain in a white plume. Polyhex Patch's network of angular lakes was still frozen to the bottom. He landed on one of them and tried to skate on the edges of his feet, but without success.

"There's too much snow," he complained, scraping it away to make a little clear spot. He balanced there on tip-toe and attempted a pirouette, which landed him flat on his rear.

"Ever graceful, the Seeker picked himself and returned to his rightful element," Starscream said. He leapt back into the sky.

Satisfied that he was up to date on the local business, he made his way to the far northeastern corner of the continent. At Search Grid Unit 1-1, he slowed and began to fly back and forth, back and forth, scanning the ground for a familiar hollow metal signature.

* * *

The weeks passed, and spring arrived for real. Now the hours of daylight stretched on and on. The snow clouds were replaced by inky rainclouds, and Starscream enjoyed the sensation of water droplets lashing over his fuselage.

As the snow vanished, he could see at last the true colors of the landscape. Streaks of brown and green appeared; the icy lakes filled with brilliant blue water. Rugged, lichen crusted rocks began to show, revealing the outlines of snowy ridges and slopes. Only the aloof mountains still kept their snows, forming a brilliant white line across the landscape.

The sky swarmed with birds. They hopped and waddled across the newly exposed ground, piping and kreeling and chirping and cawing and honking. They came in every color and size, from tiny insect-sized things to giant seabirds with wings half the breadth of his own. The latter group made him nervous for fear that he might hit one by mistake, but they were distinctive with their bright red bills, black heads, and long blue-grey wings, and as long as the sky was clear he could watch for them.

As the ground cleared, it filled quickly with new green. Ragged shoots of grass popped up amongst the dead, sodden tangle of last year's growth. Fuzzy grey buds appeared on the willows that lined the streams and meadows. Finally tiny flowers had erupted from the greening landscape in clumps of purple, yellow and white.

Each pond and puddle filled with squirming larvae. Insects emerged as if from nowhere, and soon the air was full of flies, moths, gnats, orange-winged butterflies, whining mosquitoes, dragonflies and bees. As soon as darkness began to fall, it seemed as though all of the insects in the world headed straight for his optics. The gnats in particular thronged him so thickly that when he tried to brush them away, it left black smears on his vision. He quickly learned to dim his optics when the light vanished.

And then, when the ground was almost bare of snow, the most wonderful thing of all happened: the trees leafed out. It came slowly, as a barely visible mist of pale green. Then the green thickened, and all at once the world became intensely and completely green. Gone was the endless, blank whiteness, gone was the sterile, dead landscape. Everything was alive and growing. Starscream's spirits soared. He was going to find Skyfire this summer, he could feel it. The days fled by as he raced back and forth across the grid.

But as he soon discovered, spring had an ugly side too. Not all the snow had melted right away. Sheltered behind rocks or on the sloping sides of high hills, it stayed on, stubbornly resisting the efforts of the sun. Whenever Starscream saw a lingering white patch, his mind said, _Skyfire!_ and an involuntary jolt of hope flashed through him. He rebuked himself every time, yet he could not help it. He wanted the blobs of snow to be Skyfire. Even though he knew they were snow, he looked at them anyway. They formed shapes like "Skyfire with his legs torn off," or "Skyfire broken into two halves with his arms clenched around his midsection in agony." Starscream could not stop himself from envisioning the gruesome scenes. He fretted at the slowness of his progress.

It was not until he started the systematic mile by mile survey that he truly began to comprehend the scale of the task he had undertaken. He would be covering over a million square miles, documenting potentially tens of thousands of hazards and maybe-probably false positives. His wings would take him over billions of trees and untold ocean waves. There would be mountain ranges with thousands of peaks that he would search one by one. There would be an uncountable multitude of islands. And somehow, somehow, he had to accomplish it in a single summer—though he was becoming more and more doubtful that it was possible.

His other projects advanced more quickly. With the help of the microfactory, he constructed thirteen solar-powered satellites, each no bigger than his hand, and placed them in orbit around the planet. He reviewed the data they relayed on a daily basis, searching for a distinctive white-red patch, or better yet, a hard, metallic radar blip. There were a disheartening amount of white patches, but no red ones. He investigated a few of the more promising radar blips, but as he had feared, they were merely iron or copper rich boulders. Glumly he added them to his map.

He also followed through on his resolution to examine the planet scientifically. Since there was little to do on his search besides study the ground, he took advantage of the time to research. He noted where the birds had their colonies and studied the migration patterns of the whales. Once he observed a sabertoothed cat stalking a three-horned deer. More mundane yet more challenging were his geological studies. His maps filled with symbols and a variety of dashed, dotted and toothed lines. He marked thrust faults, normal faults, strike-slip faults, unconformities, synclines, anticlines, plate boundaries, stratigraphic layers, strike/dips, volcanic sills, dikes, and more. Nor did he limit his studies to rocks. He added vegetal density to his mapes, recorded precipitation and took readings on temperature, humidity and dew point.

Yet though he studied everything, he did so in only a cursory fashion. No matter how interesting a feature was, he could neither stop to investigate it nor deviate from his survey line. He studied what appeared before him on the horizon and watched it until it disappeared behind his tailfins. It was like having a continuous banquet of knowledge, yet being allowed to taste only a single sip from each cube.

Summer came swifly upon the heels of spring, and with it endless daylight. Though the sun disappeared below the horizon at "night," the sky remained blue and the stars were nowhere to be seen. The moon was a pale spectre of its former self. It shared the sky with the sun, and Starscream often flew with the sun at one wingtip and the moon at the other.

He moved his solarsheets up from the plains to take advantage of the constant light and found himself collecting far more energy than he needed. Remembering his dilemma on the whale, he decided to place strategic caches of energon around the places he frequented. Then, even if he ended up stranded without his survival rations, he would still be able to reach a supply of cubes that would last him until repairs could be made. However, he had been careful since the incident never to be caught shorthanded again.

The young roly polies grew plump on their mother's milk. The urgency of Starscream's mission prevented him from visiting the colony as often as he would have liked, but when he passed overhead he would dip his wings to say hello. Sometimes he thought how pleasant it would be to turn himself into a seal and lie there amongst the closely packed mass of bodies, sunning himself and enjoying the loud companionship of his friends. _They have such __easy__ lives,_ he thought.

The endless days and constant buzz and thrum of life were like a drug. Where before it had been panic that drove Starscream on, now it was the season of life itself. All the creatures that shared the planet with him were eating, mating, fighting and calving. It was the season of _now_, and it demanded to be taken advantage of before the sunlight slipped away and the cold night fell once again.

Starscream had been certain that he would find Skyfire during the summer, and as the bright months flowed by he forced himself to keep up his hopes. Though he was done with but part of the first range of mountains, and though he had only managed to survey half of the ground he had set out to cover, he knew that somehow he must find Skyfire before the snow set in. It was unthinkable to spend another winter alone in his tent while Skyfire lay wounded somewhere under a white shroud.

He raced down the search lines, trying to catch up with the goals that had slipped away from him. Or was it the summer that slipped away from him? It had been shorter than he had expected. He would have to hurry now, he told himself, have to wrap it all up fast. Skyfire would appear any day, any week. Starscream would tenderly care for his wounds and spread out a tent to protect his friend from wind and rain. Soon they would be together again, the big white cargo jet and the small silver Seeker. They would talk and talk, and Starscream would relate all his adventures. Skyfire would listen, and laugh, and perhaps chide him gently for taking so long to find him.

Yes, he would find Skyfire any day now. The summer would last. He was making up for lost time.

The leaves began to turn yellow.


	12. Chapter 12

Before, Starscream had thought the search would be easy. Now he knew better. He no longer rushed himself. The first thing he did was to resurvey all the ground he had covered during the fall. It gave him grim amusement to contemplate how quickly he had abandoned his systematic methods and returned to his earlier frantic dashes. He knew he was not made for this kind of work. Skyfire had once observed that sprints were his forte, not marathons. He had never been particularly good at grinding away at the same task for months—let alone years. But as he was beginning to discover, it didn't matter what he felt or whether the task suited him. Like it or not, his only choice was to fly the grid.

So he flew. Month after month crept by. Starscream spent most of the day in the air, surveying the Northern Mountains. He spent only an hour or two each day in robot mode, which he increasingly came to view as a luxury. Where before he had viewed himself a mech with a jet altmode; now he viewed himself as a jet with a mech altmode. His flying skills, already honed by years of exploration in every kind of atmosphere, became heightened to the point that he could navigate the hidden windtraps of the mountains as easily as he could navigate the flying towers of Vos.

When spring came, he deliberately stomped out every bit of hope. Hope was a cruel lie; hope existed for sometime in the distant future, not at the present moment, where it could tease and torment him in the form of hundreds of snow patches that looked exactly like Skyfire's dismembered body. "It's all in your head," he said whenever he saw one. "No radar reflec, no body. Say no to Snowpatch Syndrome."

That summer he began several new projects. The first was an interstellar distress beacon. He knew it was a long shot, but there was a chance that there might be a spacefaring civilization in the vicinity. If they were friendly (he hoped) and he could bridge the cultural gap, there was a good chance they would help him find Skyfire. However, he didn't expect any results. It was hard to imagine that any organic aliens in the vicinity would ignore a planet like this one. Still, it would do no harm to set the beacon in orbit and let it broadcast.

His second project was more prosaic, but promised to be much more interesting. When the microfactory had finished with the beacon, he set it to the task of making a set of antigrav-equipped holographer drones that would fit onto the brackets under his wings. He constructed six of the missile-shaped devices and tested them on a survey flight.

When he passed Seal Beach, he released one and guided it to a hovering position over the colony. It fed him a stream of real-time imagery that was as vivid as if he were standing there himself. Pleased, he continued on to the mountains. Whenever he passed an item of interest—a new animal, an interesting rock outcropping, or even a false positive that he could verify without resorting to full sensors—he would drop a drone and send it off for a closer look. In this way he found he could pursue as many avenues of interest as he wanted while his main body remained chained to the survey line.

For awhile he considered building full-sized independent search and rescue drones that could survey on their own; however, when it became obvious how difficult it would be to collect all the materials he needed, he decided to leave the project for a later time. Nonetheless, he began marking mineral deposits and stockpiling materials. If nothing else, he wanted to have options open. Even if he was only able to build a single search and rescue drone, it would cut his survey time in halt.

The last project he undertook was of a more personal nature. The little red tent had become filled with projects: drone components, boxes of gear, spare parts, half-dissected birds, and rocks of every variety. He had to squeeze in through a hole in the boxes and sit in the exact center of the floor, with his elbow poking into the materials lab and his wing hovering perilously close to a stack of piled sedimentary rocks.

He needed more space. After pondering the matter, he decided to snap together a simple structure made of interlocking metal blocks. The required iron and nickel could easily be obtained from the asteroid belt.

It took him a few days to round up enough metal for his new dwelling, but this was due to his own pickiness rather than any shortage of asteroids. He collected only the purest metals, shunning the rock and water contaminated asteroids that would require processing to extract the metals within. His diligence paid off: when he placed the first chunk of pitted space metal in the microfactory, it was so pure that it required no further refinement.

The microfactory could build Construco bricks almost as fast as Starscream could insert material. In the course of one long, sunny day (and also a long, sunny night) he made 582 bricks according to the plan he had laid out in his mind. The rest was easy: he smoothed out a foundation and snapped the bricks together row on row to build a floor and walls. He left holes for windows and a door that he planned to add later. The roof was a little trickier since laying out the beams was a two person job, but he managed to get by with a little help from his drones—though he found himself wishing they could transform as well as hover.

When the basic structure was complete, Starscream walked through the doorless entryway and stood under the shade of the roof, admiring his handiwork. The smell of freshly minted metal reminded him of Cybertron, and though the walls were plain iron grey, he relished the sight.

The original design of the door had been an automated variety, but Starscream replaced it with one that swung open on simple hinges. He did not have the time to do any maintainance that might be required, and he wouldn't be around frequently enough to appreciate the luxury.

For the windows, he gathered quartz sand and melted it in the microfactory. When the molten glass was poured out in a sheet and cooled, it formed a wing-sized pane of glass. But here he discovered he had made a mistake: the sand he had selected had been tainted with iron, giving the glass a greenish tinge. He was too impatient to refine it further, so he installed the panes into the frames he had made for them and emplaced them in the window slots.

The resulting building wouldn't have won any architectural competitions, but Starscream was proud anyway because he had made it with his own hands. He added shelves along the rear wall and stacked his gear and specimen boxes inside. Next he made a new, smaller worktable (he had forgotten to bring in the one outdoors before he built the walls, and it would no longer fit through the door) and brought in the wingbacked chair. His dissections and other small projects fit easily along the length of the table. Last of all, he made a small shelf with two bowl-shaped concavities in the center. He attached it to the wall, and there he nestled the halves of the geode.

The house was far more comfortable than his tent had ever been: brighter, roomier, and quieter. What Starscream liked most were the windows. He moved the feeder so that it stood directly in front of his front window, and let himself be distracted by Chatterjaw and the other tiny visitors who came to eat. It was almost disappointing that he could not spend more time at home.

But one thing he had not anticipated was that house would make him homesick. Perhaps it was the way his feet rang across the metal floor, or the fond memories the sight of the bricks evoked. (He had long enjoyed playing with miniature versions of Constructo bricks in his youth.) He found himself dreaming of the golden ziggurats of Iacon and the whirling towers of Vos. Instead of dark wastes, he saw a twinkling city aglow with millions of lights. Soon a small sculpture of Cybertron had joined the geode on the shelf.

The summer was hot dry, and wildfires raged across the vast forests. Tens of thousands of miles of trees turned into blackened skeletons, and sometimes smoke filled the air so thickly that Starscream couldn't see the ground. The haze reached even to his valley camp, and the sky assumed a murky tan color. Diffuse light filtered down from the pink sun.

Starscream was annoyed at the disruptions to his search pattern—even as he blessed every distraction that appeared over the horizon. Over the months he had grown to loath his task. The forced monotony of flying up and down the grid each and every day, whether he felt like it or not, drained him. He found himself making excuses to tinker with equipment and stalling when he had to go back to the search. His reluctance disturbed him.

"What's the matter with you?" he would demand. "Skyfire is out there hurt, and you'd rather sit at home watching the birds? What a good friend you are! Wouldn't Skyfire be proud of you! Get out there _right now_and stop wasting time."

But no matter how he chastened himself, he could not make himself love his task.

Fall lingered long, and the winter came fitfully, with snow falling and melting a dozen times. He tried to pretend that another winter was no big deal, that two years were no worse than one year, but even so he felt himself sinking into a gloomy mood. Almost two thirds of the arctic was mapped, and he had a feeling that Skyfire would not be in the last third. Yet despite his feelings, his mind knew logically that Skyfire was just as likely to be in the final section as the two previous sections, so he forced himself onwards.

He found his thoughts turning often back to Cybertron, where it never rained or snowed, and the metal floors were always dry. He dreamed of a ship that could take him instantly back home. There he would get together a search party, and they would return instantly scour the entire surface of 283. How nice it would be, he thought, not to have to bear his burden alone. It was hard not to dwell on the fact that it would take only a year or two to reach Cybertron—if he discounted the twenty-five years spent in stasis.

"A one year flight for you, a twenty-five year death sentence for Skyfire," he reminded himself sternly. "If you left, you would be abandoning him to die."

"I won't do that," he assured himself.

"Yet you avoid going out to search for him at every opportunity."

"That's different..."

"Only in degree. Now enough of your excuses! There is no going back to Cybertron, so don't even think about it. You are going to fly the search grid every day until he's found."

He thought frequently of Skyfire. Like a phantom limb, the other mech was always with him somehow. He could imagine entire conversations with his friend, and sometimes when he spoke aloud, he half expected Skyfire to answer. Once, he thought he heard a familiar heavy step in the snow behind him, but when he turned to look it was just snow that had dropped from a branch. Other times, he would be sitting in his house and have the sudden impression that Skyfire was outside. The feeling was so strong that he could not always resist the urge to get up and look, but of course there was never anything there. He took down the geode, touching it simply for the sake of touching something that Skyfire's hands had touched.

It was a mistake to replay some of his friend's logs. The immediate effect of hearing Skyfire's warm, soft voice was to trigger an emotional breakdown that lasted for an entire week. But it did motivate him to get out and search. _Yes, __t__his is what I needed to __get__ myself __going, _acool, analytical part of himself thought. _From now on I can apply __this feeling__ as a tool. _

Yet when the spasm of grief wore off, his newfound motivation vanished too, leaving him ashamed of himself. "Where's your loyalty?" he demanded. "Don't you even care? Or is all you care about your own comfort? Some friend!"

He dwelt often upon thoughts of finding Skyfire. He could never actually imagine the part where he spotted his friend and flew down for a closer look (there had been too many painful disappointments for that) but he liked to envision stooping at Skyfire's side to examine the other's wounds. He would rehearse treating this or that injury in his mind, then take out the tools to repair them. How tender he would be with Skyfire's hurts; how carefully he would clean and seal them. And then, when all was done, he would bring Skyfire back online.

He could not quite decide what Skyfire first words would be, or what he himself would say in return. Would it be best to apologize right away for not going after Skyfire in the storm? Or should he just be quiet and let Skyfire speak first? Perhaps it would be better to begin by getting Skyfire oriented, "Believe it or not, it's been two years since I saw you last..." He played the conversation over and over, but could neither make heads nor tails of it.

At the very end of his fantasy, a greedy part of him would begin digging through the boxes in Skyfire's hold for everything he had wanted over the last two years. The big tent would give him as much room as he needed, and he could sit in his comfortable old dented up chair. All the scientific equipment he lacked would be there, and a microfactory whose capabilites dwarfed those of the one from his survival kit. And of course there would be all the familiar little things that had turned their camp into a home: Skyfire's doodles on the wall of the tent; the _B__xognye ykooya_ skull full of energon goodies; the lucky rubber band mech.

Not all his fantasies were so pleasant. When his mood darkened, he would see himself kneeling, weeping beside Skyfire's corpse. For a long time he would do nothing but cry, but finally he would begin to prepare Skyfire's body to bring it back to Cybertron. He would weld together the wreckage in the proper shape as best he could, then build a tow assembly so that he could drag Skyfire back. If Skyfire was in jet mode, he would have to take all the cargo out, cut his friend's body up into pieces, haul them into orbit one by one, and reassemble them in space. The thought horrified him.

Perhaps if Skyfire wasn't too damaged, it would be possible to repair him enough to initiate one last transformation. In robot mode his friend's body would be much more manageable. Starscream could build a streamlined box that would enclose the corpse completely. It would be matte grey, and he would emboss a red and white glyph for Skyfire's name on the top.

Getting the box into orbit would be a tough pull, but he thought he could do it. This presented problems of its own, of course. He would have to transform Skyfire back into jet mode whenever he wanted to access the cargo inside the other's hold.

"How very pragmatic you are," he thought aloud. "Just because he's dead doesn't mean he's not useful. Because of course you would never do without any of the comforts you might want from his hold on your trip back."

"He carries more than luxuries," he replied. "What about all the spare parts? The backup solarsheets? And the telescope is on loan from the Academy. It would be dangerous and irresponsible to go back without them."

"Go ahead and keep telling yourself that. While you use Skyfire as a cargo container. You're the most selfish person in the whole universe."

"Skyfire would have wanted me to take the supplies and play it safe. He wouldn't begrudge me one final service."

"Sure. And why not cannibalize him for spare parts while you're at it?"

"I hate myself," Starscream moaned.

When he returned from his day's flight, he would take down the geode and looked at it for awhile. His friend wouldn't have such thoughts or try to avoid flying the grid. Skyfire was a loyal, true friend who always thought of other's needs before his own. _He broke away to avoid colliding with you,_ Starscream reminded himself. _He gave his life to save yours. __And then you laughed for joy while he screamed for help._

Starscream imagined Skyfire shouting for him over the radio, "Starscream! Starscream! Where are you? Please—help—_please—!"_

He set the geode down on his desk and covered his face with a hand. _Why didn't I go after him? Why? _

The winter seemed like the longest he had endured yet. And even when the sun returned, it did not lift his spirits. The snow grew wet and dripped from the branches; the new grass greened the hills; and the birds came back. He looked at the eager life springing forth all around himself, then looked inside himself and saw darkness and death. And in some strange way this satisfied him, for it meant that he was not happy while Skyfire was broken in some lonely place.

Even Chatterjaw and the roly polies could no longer make him smile. He longed for their sympathy and understanding, but the squirrel did not trust him and the roly polies barely recognized him. He was an outsider again. On the few occasions when he stopped to say hello to the calves he had watched grow up, he reminded himself sharply that every moment he wasted was a moment that could cost Skyfire his life.

Each day he whipped himself up to leave the house and go out on the search, and each day he returned defeated and stole a few shameful moments in robot mode to pursue various scientific problems. Once ensconced in his house, the thought of flying was utterly unbearable and he delayed as long as possible before going back out. He hated himself for his reluctance. In an effort to quell his self-indulgence, he denied himself music and threw out his energon goodies.

"Perhaps this will motivate you, hm?" he snapped. "Do you want to go save your friend now, or would you rather goof off at camp?" But even this didn't help.

One day, when he was flying home across a strip of forest that he had already searched, he noticed a hard radar reflection that wasn't marked on his map. Puzzled, he swooped down and found what he expected—an outcrop of metal-rich stone planted in the moss amidst the trees. Why wasn't it marked on the map? He examined the section. Finding nothing amiss, he resurveyed it.

Afterwards he was haunted by doubts. He clearly remembered surveying the area the previous year, but he hadn't seen the reflection then. Had he forgotten to mark it on the map? Or could the rock have been covered up with dirt? But no—the surface of the stone was encrusted with lichens; it had clearly been exposed for years. What if he had missed the rock's signature entirely? But that would mean that he might have missed other things too. Perhaps he had already flown right by Skyfire without realizing it.

The thought filled him with sinking dread. If he had missed Skyfire, then everything he had done so far was pointless. He could search for years on end, and still find nothing. _Why couldn't y__ou have been__ more careful?_ he thought. _Now you've __destroyed__ everything. _

The only thing that kept him from total despair was the calm voice in the back of his head that insisted the odds that he had missed Skyfire were very low. To reassure himself of this fact, he went back and resurveyed a week's worth of area. When he found no new blips, he told himself that the boulder had been an isolated incident. But he was never truly certain again.

That summer he finished surveying the arctic and began working his way down the transit line. He had decided to survey a 500 mile wide corridor leading from the area where the storm had struck down all the way to the south pole. Skyfire could have rounded the pole and continued up the other side of the planet, but that wasn't a thought that Starscream was ready to deal with yet.

As the creatures of summer frolicked and feasted, he made his way doggedly southward and was soon flying over the ocean. Many of his sensors weakened as the water grew deeper, and his radar did not work below the surface at all. But he had prepared for this by having the microfactory build him an entirely new sensor array designed for locating underwater wreckage. It took a month to construct, and two days to install, but he was satisfied with the results.

He also revamped his drones, adding sonar and magnetometers for metal detection. When he wanted to double check a false positive, he would deploy them for a closer look. He himself had little desire to go down into the depths.

The ocean was endlessly flat andoffered little of interest, but at least it was easy to survey. His progress was swift, and he thought that he would finish early.

That was before he encountered the manganese fields. When he first encountered the deposits, he wondered if something was wrong with his sensors. How could the entire floor of the ocean be composed of metal?

He sent a drone down to investigate, and found that he was not mistaken. The bottom was composed of round, dark metal beads. When he reluctantly entered the water and brought one up, he found that the interior was composed of ring-like layers. The nodule had grown like a mineralogical tree, putting on new "wood" each year.

"Found large deposit of metallic nodules," he recorded in the log. "Bodies are primarily composed of manganese, with smaller amounts of iron, silicon, nickel and copper."

The manganese fields were nothing but a huge false positive. Starscream was forced to slow to a crawl as the drones swarmed back and forth across the seafloor, checking every other rock and bump. He soon grew to hate the nodules.

In late summer, he decided to take a break from the transit line to survey the arctic ocean, which he had skipped before. Here the ice floated in tremendous sheets that Starscream could land and walk upon. Seals crowded the ice, and he spotted many roly polies among them. Once he watched a small black whale lunge up onto the edge of the ice, seize a roly poly in its jaws, and pull it under. The other roly polies fled barking away from the water.

Starscream was not the type to deny the harsher realities of nature, but the incident provoked such a outrush of pity that he almost cried. He wanted to tell the frightened survivors that he understood what it was like to lose a friend, that he cared, oh, how he cared. But there was nothing he could say to them, and to go near them would only frighten them further. Choking back sobs, he flew on.

Some objective corner of his mind had noted that his reaction was exaggerated. Yet he couldn't seem to get hold of his emotions; indeed, he had the frightening sensation that he was progressively losing control over himself. When the materials lab suffered a glitch, he screamed at it and would have struck it if the machine hadn't been critical to his survival. Afterwards his rage burned for hours. Another time, he saw some big grey birds drive a little brown bird away from the feeder. He broke down and wept at the injustice of it all. _What's wrong with me?_ he wondered. _Am I losing it? _ He pondered the problem as he flew the search grid, but he found no clear answers. All he knew was that things were changing inside him, and not for the better—but, he told himself, everything would be alright once he found Skyfire.

It was getting harder and harder to believe that Skyfire was still alive. After three years, what were the odds? By this time, that huge white (or death grey) body would be covered with blobs of moss, or perhaps barnacles and polyps. Saplings would have grown up around him, and his weight would make him sink bit by bit into the spring mud. Starscream tried to comfort himself with the thought that Skyfire could have crashed in a desert, where he would be perfectly preserved for eons, but then he wondered how he would ever find Skyfire if the other jet were buried under a sand dune. When he thought about Skyfire's odds, hopelessness overwhelmed him. He would have given anything to find Skyfire, yet he could not seem to give enough.

The more Starscream searched the transit line, the more he felt like he was pursuing a lost cause. There was simply nothing interesting out in the ocean to see, and unless Skyfire had bizarrely decided to go for a dive, it made more sense that the other jet would have stuck to the coast. Unless of course Skyfire had decided to be thorough and do the transit first, then make another pass around the planet across the land. Yet Starscream didn't think so.

But if he abandoned the transit line, then where should he search? There were two continents that fell roughly along the path of the transit, and Skyfire could have visited any part of them. When Starscream contemplated the task of searching them, a hopeless feeling came over him. He continued working the transit line because he could not face the alternative.

A short, wet fall came in a flurry of yellow leaves, and was followed almost immediately by a foot of snow. Starscream was aggravated, for he had intended to make some last minute improvements to his house before the end of the season. His nickel-iron bricks were rusting, and he was forced to clean off the snow and let them dry out so that he could paint them. (He chose red in tribute to his old tent.) The meltwater he tracked in froze on the floor, making the interior into a slippery puddle. He had to add an energon-guzzling heater to keep the ice at bay, but this caused condensation to form around the seams of the door and on the doorknob. The door hinges rusted and gave an awful squeak when the door swung. Worse still, the interior of the door's latch mechanicism rusted, and soon the door handle would not even turn. He had to replace the entire assembly.

As he worked through his tardy winterization projects, he watched winter birds eating at the feeder. They would appear, peck a few times, then vanish into the spruce trees—only to return a few moments later for another helping. Starscream found himself reminded of his own drones, which he allowed to roam free when he was in camp. They double checked false positives or tracked animals, making behavioral recordings. He had set up a small antenna at the top of Mount Misery to help them navigate, and when they ran low on energon they would reappear suddenly and dock in the charging station, startling the birds and sending Chatterjaw into a frenzy of warning calls. Eventually, to give his poor nervous friend a respite, he moved the charging station a mile downhill and programmed the drones to avoid flying over the camp.

It was while he working on this project that he began to reconsider his earlier idea of creating real search and rescue drones. At the time, the project had seemed too complex and time consuming. He hadn't known where to find the materials he needed, and he had never tried to build anything that large with his microfactory before. But now, after four years on 283, things were different. His geological surveys had turned up deposits of almost every kind of substance he needed, and he had already demonstrated that the microfactory could produce both working sensors and drones. It wouldn't be easy to build a full scale drone, but it could be done.

The more Starscream thought over the idea, the more he liked it. He imagined dozens of fully equipped drones cruising across the planet, tirelessly searching. Even if it took two years to build that many, it would still save more time than if he tried to survey the next two continents by himself. _And, _a part of him thought gleefully, _to build the drones you'll have to stay at camp in robot mode. No more flying the grid! _A flicker of his old enthusiasm returned.

Starscream closed up the last square of ocean and returned to camp. It felt heavenly to know that he would not have to come back to it for months.


	13. Chapter 13

Once he started the project, everything moved along swiftly. He spent several days reviewing drone blueprints and picking out the features he needed. The vehicle would have to be tough enough to stand up to wind and weather; fully autonomous; adapted for 283's atmosphere and gravity; capable of hauling the search equipment he would need; and able to make transcontinental flights without refueling.

He found most of what he wanted in the form of the D-119 Super Sight, a drone about one third his own size. It had been designed for use on the planet Kgocvlev, which Starscream looked up and found was similar to 283 in almost every respect that mattered. There were a few shortcomings: the drone had not been designed for planet-crossing flights, and it was only capable of remaining in the air for about a day without refueling. However, Starscream discovered a modular subspace fuel tank attachment for it, and was able to increase the time between refueling to three days.

When he was satisfied with the design, he submitted it to the microfactory and received back a list of materials. He scrutinized it with a frown. It seemed that the drone would be using nearly every one of the 329 materials the factory could work in. But already he was beginning a mental checklist of places where he could find each resource.

The next few months were the happiest he had spent since coming to the planet. With a fresh, challenging problem to solve and a definite end in sight, his motivation returned. His spirits climbed, and he dashed into the fray with the old whirlwind energy that always marked the beginning of a new plan. Already he was looking past the first drone to the second, envisioning improvements he could make. There should be separate varieties of drone for oceanic and land surveys. And he would want to resurvey everything he had already done, as a double check. Once he had a fleet of drones at his disposal, there would be no limit to what he could accomplish.

"No search party? No problem!" he said, laughing. "I'll build one instead!"

He darted back and forth across the planet on a treasure hunt. Here was a deposit of antimony; there was kaolinite, cobalt, and indium. Even the manganese nodules played their role. He took samples of each resource he collected and tested them in the materials lab; if satisfactory, he began processing them and went out and gathered more. His house filled with bags of rocks and sediment. When he walked about, grit crunched underfoot.

Both the factory and the lab were running night and day. The shape of the drone's titanium fuselage began appearing in sections. The wings and tailfins knit together, and the wiring to the ailerons was soon complete. Next came the sensor arrays and the charging connector. He tested each piece carefully before adding it to the main body lying on the worktable. The final step was to insert the drone's processor and install an AI. He retrieved a copy of the D-119's search and rescue programming and uploaded it to the drone. Then, as the finishing touch, he gave the fuselage a coat of his own blue paint.

Starscream gazed down at his creation with marvelling optics, eating up every line of the metal frame.

"There, now you're finished," he said, stroking its freshly dried hull. "Are you ready to help me find Skyfire?"

The AI, not being smart enough to understand speech, said nothing. Starscream just smiled.

"Now to get you out of the house."

It was a minor pain to squeeze the drone out through the front door, but Starscream managed. Once he was outside however, he quickly had second thoughts. Dark had fallen, and the wind was up. Light snow was falling.

"Well, maybe I'll test you on a nicer day," he said. "I guess I wouldn't want you to get lost in a storm too." The drone made no response.

He heaved the drone, now damp with snow, back inside and laid it on the work table. "You know what? We should have a party, in honor of your creation date."

Smiling, he poured a few energon goodies into the charging station and told the drone to recharge. It rose on antigravs and settled on the dock.

"Good huh?" he said.

He helped himself to the rest of the goodies. Then he put on his favorite song and took down the geode. As he gazed into the glittering blue and red crystals, he made a quick, pessimistic estimate for how long it would take to survey the two continents that lay along the transit line. Then he calculated the area that the drone could survey per day; the amount of area that two drones could survey per day; the amount of area that three drones could survey per day, and so on until he reached twenty-three drones. That was the amount needed to survey the two continents and surrounding ocean in a year. But it would take more than a year to build all the drones.

How fast could he build one? Now that he knew where all the materials were, he could easily gather up enough to build dozens more drones; in fact, he had already stockpiled most of the minerals and chemicals he needed. That would shave a month off the build time for each unit. And if he used the microfactory to build another microfactory, then he could cut the build time in half again. And if he used those microfactories to build two more microfactories... Starscream grinned.

"I should have done this years ago," Starscream said. He went out to get a cube of high grade from the energon shed. Tonight he was going to celebrate.

* * *

By the time morning had arrived, the snow had stopped. The wind was still blowing, but that was a fact of life given that the valley floor had no trees. Slightly nervous and a little tipsy, Starscream hauled the drone outside, plodding through snow that was half way up to his knees. From up on his tree at the edge of the clearing, Chatterjaw gave a few perplexed barks.

"Look what I made!" Starscream said, holding the sky blue drone up for examination. "I don't have a name for it yet. At least I'm not referring to it as "her," eh?" He laughed.

Chatterjaw scittered gracefully up to the top of the tree and stared watchfully, his/her (Starscream had never figured out which) beady black eyes focusing intently on drone. Pleased to have an audience, Starscream made a show of bringing the drone online. He stood back and it levitated up from the ground under its own power.

"Tada," he said. "Announcing the arrival of...of...Rescuer 1!"

He transmitted instructions to the newly dubbed drone to fly up the long barren strip that ran down the valley. Gracefully it turned, activating its thrusters, and roared upwards towards Mt. Misery.

"And there it goes!" he cried. "Look at it! Beautiful! Beautiful!"

The drone disappeared into a speck, and he magnified, watching it as it soared upwards. How would it handle the air currents that swirled around Mt. Misery? He instructed it to circumnavigate the mountain. Obediently the drone heeled over and began to curve.

As it flew around the rim of the peak and disappeared from view, Starscream felt a moment of disquiet. Fortunately he could still track the drone's position thanks to the antenna at the top of the mountain. He followed the plane as it travelled around the slopes and came back into view on the other side.

"Bravo! Well done!" he shouted.

The drone gave a strange jerk. Starscream froze. Suddenly the sky blue craft began veering wildly to side to side.

"What are you doing? Land! Land!" Starscream yelled, sending it instructions to touch down. The drone dove straight down. "No! Stop! Go back up! Up up up!"

Too late. The drone smashed nose first into the snowy side of Mt. Misery. There was no explosion—its fuel was stored in subspace—but there was a distinct _whump_ that resounded across the valley. Starscream gaped. The drone's skyblue tailfins stuck out of the snow like a flag.

Then, to his bewilderment, the tailfins began to move, drifting downhill. For a second he thought the drone was still online, burrowing around in the snow. A deep rumble filled the air. Then he realized the entire slope was in motion.

"Oh no."

The blue tailfins disappeared as the moving slab of snow began to crumble into a powdery mass. Starscream leapt into the air, thinking to save the drone—then paused. His camp was directly in the path of the avalanche. Suddenly he realized the meaning of the treeless zone at the bottom of the valley. It was a slide zone.

He lunged for the house. The microfactory was humming busily, its arms whirling in a busy storm of motion. Across the room the materials lab was spread out across a table. A deafening roar was building outside. There was the crunch of trees snapping.

He grabbed the yanked the materials lab off the table, the pieces clattering onto the floor. With the other hand he seized the microfactory's handle. His optics caught sight of the geode, but there was no time. He hurled himself out the door.

A white wall of snow was crashing down the slope at 200 mph. He bent his knees, preparing to leap into the safety of the sky, when he heard a terrified chatter. His gaze flew to the branch where Chatterjaw was giving a last warning.

Starscream raced for the tree. He dropped the gear, seized the trunk with both hands, and pulled. It came out with an earthy rip. He folded it under his arm, Chatterjaw still clinging desperately. Then he grabbed the microfactory's handle—there was no time for the materials lab. The white wave was bearing down. He jumped into the air.

The avalanche hit his legs like an express train. He was knocked over onto his back and then everything went white. The roar of the snow filled the world, and he was tumbling, tumbling. Sometimes he saw the sky, sometimes it was white or dark. He felt his wings crunching, or perhaps it was the splintering of trees. It seemed as though he had been sucked down, down into a neverending whirlpool. He gripped the handle of the microfactory. With his other arm he flailed, trying to swim through the snow that filled his mouth and plugged his intakes.

Finally he sensed the slide slowing to an abrupt halt. He was on his back; snow covered his optics like a red-tinted blindfold. Pressure was pushing down on his body. He tried to claw to the surface, but his limbs refused to move. _ I'm buried! _ The snow in his mouth muffled a scream. For a few mad moments he jerked about on his antigravs and tried to transform. All to no avail. Bottled terror raced through him in frenzied circle. The unbearable grip hemmed him in. _Buried alive!_ _Buried alive!_

Starscream had always been a bit claustro, but it had never manifested in anything beyond a slight nervousness about elevators and little rooms with locked doors. Some rational corner of his mind realized that he was now having a full blown panic attack. _Calm down,_ he told himself, _calm down __and think__. __It can't hurt you. You'll get out, soon. Calm down. _He repeated the words till his panic subsided to a jangling fear in the back of his mind.

He would never get out by force, that much was obvious now. The snow had turned to cement, and there was just too much of it on top of him. He reached out with his scanners and found the surface ten feet above. The snow in his mouth was melting slowly.

Could he heat his way out? He thought of his laser cannons, but then realized neither of them was still attached. They had been made to clip on and off, and the force of the avalanche had ripped them off their mountings. But what about his thrusters? No—without air, they wouldn't function, and there was no place to draw air from.

What if he subspaced the snow? He seized upon the idea and instantly began filling his subspaces. Air pockets opened above his torso and arms, only to disappear as the snow ceiling collapsed on top of him. He pulled more and more snow into subspace, moving his arms as he did so until he got them over his chest. Soon he began to see a faint blue light above him. He hoped he had enough room to hold it all.

It took him ten minutes to subspace the snow that lay over his chest. He clawed the snow away from his face, and at last blue sky could be seen above. A whimper of gratitude emerged from his lips. His legs and wings were still trapped, and it took over an hour to wriggle himself free. At last he stood and clambed out of the hole he had made.

The valley was starkly different. The slide had swept down the side of Mt. Misery and erased everything in its path. The house, the energon shed—everything was gone. Even the trees along the side of the valley had been snapped off or uprooted; the broken trunks lay in tangled piles down the slope. Starscream realized that Chatterjaw was nowhere to be seen. He felt the urge to call, but knew it would be futile. For four years the little squirrel had been his neighbor and companion. Now he had failed a second friend.

_ I'm sorry,_ he thought.

He took stock of himself, moving his joints and running diagnostics. His wings had suffered the most damage; one was bent at an awkward angle and the other was simply gone, snapped off at the root. A twisted piece of his main spar jutted out of his shoulder as a testament to the force that severed wing from body. The rest of him was surprisingly unharmed. He was sore and one of his arms hurt to bend, but beyond that all he had received were some ugly scratches in his paint.

As he worked his elbow joint back and forth, he thought of the microfactory. He remembered holding it on the way down, but he couldn't remember it being there when he dug himself out. Frowning, he climbed down into the pit again and dug around where his hand had been buried. After a few minutes, he found a handle. The rest of the microfactory was nowhere to be seen.

He stood there, holding the handle, and slowly it sunk in. Everything was _gone_. The microfactory, the materials lab, the box of cartridges, the backup solar sheets, the bins of spare parts, all of the survival equipment that had been meant to sustain him on his twenty year journey back to Cybertron—everything had vanished somewhere in the great white tsunami that had plunged down the valley.

He was unsupplied. Alone. Three million light years from home.

And Skyfire... Skyfire was doomed.


	14. Chapter 14

Step by step, Starscream trudged up the slide. His feet crunched in the packed snow, and with each step his spirits sank. This was a disaster, a disaster of incalculable magnitude. If he could not find his equipment, how could he repair his wings? How could he repair the drone? How could he build the fleet he had planned? And what would become of him without the supplies that had been meant to sustain him over the course of decades? With no oil, no engine cleaner, nor any of his spare parts, how could he stay alive?

He came to the spot where his house had been. There was nothing there now but snow. He gazed at the line of footseps that led back down the valley. The slide had dragged him into a sort of gully that curved off into the trees, but the bulk of the avalanche had travelled straight down into the main forest and spent itself there.

He would have to look for what equipment he could find. Leaping into the air, he made a slow, painful transformation. Almost instinctively, he formed a grid in his mind and began flying back and forth down the hill, looking for anything metal.

For awhile he found nothing, and feared the worst. His sensors had been intended for Skyfire-sized hunks of metal, not isolated bits scattered around beneath the snow. Just as he was giving in to despair, he noticed a blip on his rader.

He transformed and quickly began to dig. Two feet down he touched metal, and brought up a charred constructo brick. A small triumph, but a crucial one—where there was one piece, there was more. And if the microfactory could be found, then he could use it to build a proper metal detector to find the rest. But where had the charring come from? One side of the brick was blackened. For a moment Starscream puzzled over the problem, then remembered the energon shed. He hadn't heard any explosion, but the contents of the shed must have detonated when the slide hit.

The day waned and darkness fell. He dug up four more constructo bricks, a specimen case, and a piece of the materials lab. For awhile he dared to hope that everything might still be recoverable.

That was before he found the microfactory—or rather, what was left of it. A tree had neatly impaled the device, gutting the arms and tearing out the inside. He dug around the place he found the machine, looking for the missing parts, but found nothing more. It was scrap.

After that he sat numbly for awhile, staring at the machine. All of his hopes had rested upon the power of the microfactory, and now it was gone.

Over the course of a week, he unearthed a pile of bricks, some pieces of the roof, the door, six twisted shelves, the work table, a box of spare thruster parts, two specimen cases, the crumpled form of the drone, and the box that had once held the cartridges. The box had come unsealed when the avalanche struck, and now it was empty. His missing wing had turned up too, to his relief. It had continued down the slope without him and ended up buried in the foot of the slide. Of the rest of his gear, there was no sign save for numerous charred pieces of metal. He suspected that some of it had been destroyed when the contents of his energon store had destabilized.

He set up a makeshift camp at the top of the ridge where the trees still grew thick. The square of solar sheet he had kept on him was now his sole means of gathering energy. He kept it carefully weighted down with tree trunks. There weren't enough constructo bricks left to rebuild his house, but he could at least make a shelter. He began stacking the bricks together. There weren't enough of them to build a real house, but at least he could have a little protection from the wind. If nothing else it would stave off the decision he would have to make a little longer.

One brick wouldn't fit onto its fellows. He turned it over, expecting to see damage from the explosion, but instead he found packed snow. Sighing, he began digging it out. Underneath something hard was lodged. With an effort he worked it free. It was round on the bottom, like—_No, it can't be. _

He brushed the object off. Crystals glittered in the starlight, and he broke into a smile. What were the odds? Laughing, he clutched the geode to his chest. A weight he didn't known existed fell off him.

He settled back against the shallow wall of his shelter and drew his knees up to his chest. Ejecting a probe from his finger, he began to delicately clean the snow out of the geode. As he worked, his mind wandered over the surface of 283, searching the continents, the oceans, the ice caps. Then he looked down at the geode.

If he stayed, he would be there for years, and he would be alone. His systems would gradually wear down, his oil would grow old and sticky, and finally something would fail. Even now, with his lost wing welded back onto the mount, it would take months for it to heal. He wouldn't be able to fly normally till spring.

He looked up at the starry sky and picked out the distant glowing spot that was the Great Spiral. Back there was home, friends, supplies, help. But to go back would mean certain death for Skyfire.

He looked back down at the geode. On the bottom faint scratches were still visible: "Crack it open! :)"

"Oh Skyfire," he murmured. "What do I do?"

For another week he lingered at the slide, digging around and trying to choose a course. He played out countless arguments in his head.

"I won't, I can't leave him to die."

"Staying here is a slow death for you. Leave while you can still fly."

"He's my friend. How can I desert him?"  
"You aren't deserting him. You're returning to Cybertron for help."

"But by the time I return it will be too late."

"It's too late now. He's probably dead already."

Then he would change the angle and start the argument anew.

"The only reason you want to give up is so that you can go back to Cybertron."

"So what if I want to go back? The point is, I can't continue on without any gear."

"Don't give me excuses. You're only giving up because you want to go home so much. If you were a true friend, you would stay even if it cost you your life. Only a coward would abandon his friend. So what will it be?"

Starscream rubbed his face and heaved a sigh. How could he make this decision?

* * *

Moonlight shone on the dark peak of Shrieker Mountain. Starscream had returned to the spot where he had landed in the storm all those years ago, or as close to it as he could make out. The storm had not yet begun, but the wind was picking up. It was only a matter of time.

Suddenly he felt the prickling changes on his sensors. He braced himself, and there came a distant roar. A frightened part of him cried, _avalanche!_ But it was wind, not snow, that came howling down the mountain. In a flash he was thrown back almost to the ground.

He fought to remain upright, holding his arm up in front of his optics to block the blinding snow. The storm blotted out the moon and stars, and all was blackness. He hunched down in the depression he had selected. For a few moments he listened to the shrieks and moans of the wind.

He offlined his optics.

"Skyfire, I...I don't know if you're alive or dead. I have wondered if you were calling to me in the wind, trying to tell me what happened." He paused, feeling rather foolish, then continued, "If you can hear me now, please tell me what to do."

He listened, and heard the wind scream like a dying mech. It buffeted his sore wings with cruel blasts. He turned sideways to ease the strain, and it began to gutter in his intakes.

Then he heard it.

"Staaaaaaaaaaaarscreeeeeaaaaam!" It sounded like it was coming from somewhere far away, yet he could not tell if the voice was Skyfire's.

"I'm here!' he shouted. "I'm listening."

He leaned forward intently, optics off but every sense keen. The only noises that came were the sounds of the wind. _You're imagining what you want to hear._

"Save me!" a voice cried.

Starsceam's optics flashed online. He leapt to his feet. "Skyfire? _Skyfire!" _

He looked around, searching for a familiar set of blue optics piercing the storm, or a ghostly figure, or anything, he didn't know what.

"I'm here, I'm here!" he shouted. "Tell me what to do!"

But there was no response. He waited, and an hour passed. Sometimes he thought he heard the wind whisper, _Go away,_ and then it seemed to plead, _Stay, stay._ He stood with his optics off, listening as hard as he could. But he was no longer certain if he was hearing or imagining.

The dark hours passed one by one, and Starscream waited in increasing desperation. He had never been superstitious, and he did not believe in gods. But Skyfire had believed in a God—not Primus, exactly, though he said Primus was a facet.

Starscream knelt. In a voice he tried to make as humble and respectful as possible, he said,

"I've never prayed before, to you or anyone, but I know Skyfire worshipped you. If you care about him at all, please help me. I can't find him, and I don't know what to do." His voice took on a pleading note. "I've run out of supplies, and I need guidance. Help me for Skyfire's sake. Please. If you help me, I'll do anything you want. I swear it on my wings."

_Maybe some sacrifices would help,_ a sarcastic corner of his mind suggested, but he listened anyway, hoping against hope for a response. But there was nothing but the unintelligible murmur of wind words, and he could not understand that tongue. _You fool, _he thought.

Then he remembered that many peoples believed that deities lived in mountains and streams. What if there was a spirit who dwelt inside Shrieker Mountain, who was trying to speak with him? Was he praying to the wrong god?

Starscream bowed his head. "If—if anyone can hear me, then please help."

It struck him as absurd that he was now praying to the mountain which he blasted with lasers at every opportunity. Abruptly he remembered how he had triggered an avalanche on the slope of Shrieker Mountain. And now he had lost everything in an avalanche.

A supernatural chill ran through him. The darkness seemed to take on a life of its own, a cold, snowblind wrath that would have ripped him apart had it the strength. What if the mountain really was alive? Hadn't it released a storm upon him and Skyfire when they first came? Nature spirits could be evil as well as good; the storm gods were usually portrayed as malicious demons. Mockingly the wind laughed and tugged at his wings.

He would have left then, but the storm was blowing so fiercely he didn't dare leave the ground. Trying not to look afraid, he sought shelter in the depression as best he could. _Superstitious nonsense,_ he thought. He tried not to imagine dark, hissing voices whispering in his audios.

Time passed. Why had he hoped that coming back would solve anything? He was still as torn as ever. How he wished Skyfire could speak to him. Or did he?

It had been a long time since Starscream had listened to the logs that he and Skyfire had made together. Now he tentatively opened one.

Skyfire's achingly familiar voice began speaking, "Have found the fault that separates the schist from the sandstone. Starscream is going to cut a section of the sandstone into thin-sections and analyze each and every grain under the petroscope."

Starscream heard heard his own recorded voice squawk, "No I'm not!" and Skyfire laughed. It was a warm, comforting laugh that beat back the icy voices in the wind. Starscream felt strength and assurance flow through him.

He skipped backwards, playing entries at random and then simply choosing memories from his databanks. Some were happy, others mundane, still others so dear he might have wept. He moved back and back through the years until finally he found the memory he realized he had been searching for all along.

Skyfire and him had been sitting together on a low ledge of sharp volcanic glass. The sky was orange and clouds of ash drifted across the red sun.

They had been walking together over the volcanic landscape when suddenly Skyfire had fallen through the crust of hardened lava. Beneath was a volcanic cavern with a river of magma flowing into darkness.

All Starscream saw was Skyfire suddenly scream and disappear into a hole. Unthinking, he leapt in after him. Together they plunged into the river of magma. Fortunately it was a very shallow river, coming up only to their ankles.

Skyfire seized him bodily and hurled him out of the cavern, then drew his gun. With several well-placed blasts, he collapsed the side of the cave, then climbed up over the debris to the surface. They went over to a nearly ledge and sat down to clean off their feet.

"You could have been killed!" Starscream exclaimed as he chipped the half-frozen lava off his feet with a shard of obsidian.

Skyfire's voice was unexpectedly harsh. "_You_ could have been killed."

Starscream looked up from his work, startled. Skyfire was silent for a moment, visibly calming himself. Then he began,

"Listen Starscream. If I get in trouble, I don't want you to jump in too. You should have stayed put until you understood what happened, then helped if possible. I don't want you to throw your life away in a blind effort to save me."

"So I was supposed to just stand there?"

Skyfire nodded emphatically. "Yes! That's exactly what you should have done. This isn't just something I'm saying because you're my friend. It's the practical thing to do. If the lava had been deeper, we would have both fallen in, and then who would have rescued either of us? I need to you to keep safe so that you can rescue me."

Starscream stared down at his glass-coated feet, and Skyfire evidently saw the chagrin written on his face, for he reached out and placed a hand on his shoulder. In a gentler voice he added,

"But thank you anyway."

As the wind blew over him, Starscream stared off into the darkness. He knew now what Skyfire would want him to do. At some level, a part of him had always known, though he had tried to ignore it. But how would he ever summon the strength to leave his friend to die?

* * *

The warm spring wind blew across the plains, and Starscream's hands meticulously went over his remaining equipment.

_If you leave, you are a coward._

He had stripped as many spare parts from the drone as he could. After emptying the contents of the specimen cases, he stored the parts in the subspace compartments that had once held leaves and shells. The drone's empty bodyshell carried everything he could not carry on his person—the bulk of the constructo bricks, the warped shelves, the disassembled worktable, and assorted loose scraps left over. He did not know what he would do with them, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

_You're abandoning __Skyfire__ to die._

His hands bound up the geode in soft grasses and tucked it inside a crude basket of woven willows. He placed it in subspace. He had already said his goodbyes to the roly polies. Unless they had long lifespans, he would never see them again. Chatterjaw's crypt, a single constructo block with words and a name inscribed on the side, was up by his old valley camp. When he had visited it last, he had found it lying on its side. He had leaned it back up against the trunk of a spruce. When he returned it would be covered with moss.

_You're going to kill Skyfire. __ He trusted you._

He plucked up the stakes holding down the solarsheet, then crumpled it up into a ball and forced it back into its canister. The stakes he placed inside the drone, along with a large rock. His hammer had disappeared in the avalanche.

_You're a murderer._

He looked around. There was nothing left of his temporary camp. He was ready.

_You should have been the one to die. _

His body shifted into jet mode. He waggled his ailerons, testing his still-sore wings. They would bear him now. Backing up, he extended his tow cable to the crunched nose of the drone and snapped it in place.

One last time he took in the white expanse of the plains, the wet snow, the blue sky with summer clouds coursing overhead. Soon it would all be behind him, and he would not return for fifty years. He would not see Skyfire again for a long, long time.

"I swear I will come back for you," he said. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."

For a moment longer he hesitated, then his thrusters ignited and he was going up, up into the blue. The sky dimmed and turned black. He subspaced his atmospheric thrusters and brought out his lightdrive. The hard, cold stars surrounded him. He pointed his nose towards the Great Spiral.

And then he left Skyfire to die.


	15. Chapter 15

In front of Starscream lay a thick cloud of bright blue stars swimming in vast seas of hydrogen, helium and dust—the approaching line of the Fabulous Arm. He dared not look behind, where the stars were old, red, and dense as sea froth. If he looked back he would find that one yellow star, and his pace would slow—no—he must not look back—he must go on.

To reach the Great Spiral, he would have to cut straight through the encoiling Fabulous Arm, then through the outer Magnificent Arm, and finally traverse the Void itself. At his current pace, it would take him about 190 days to reach the edge of the Firework. He was heading almost directly out of the galactic disc and slightly downwards.

Though he was travelling at multiple times the speed of light, no journey had ever felt so slow. The stars fled by him, yet their passage gave little sensation of motion, and the Great Spiral grew no larger. He was wretchedly aware that each hour of flight increased the distance between him and Skyfire. In his mind, he imagined his friend pleading with him to go back, arguing with him, begging him. Yet his thrusters carried him on and on into the star-flecked darkness.

What excuse did he have now, to pretend that he was Skyfire's friend? He had forfeited all right to that title. A betrayer, a coward, a murderer was he now, and always would be—unless Skyfire himself were to pardon him. He burnt the words into his soul, _coward, traitor, murderer,_ and let them feed and fester until he knew they were true down deep, deep inside. And as the cold stars watched, he wept for Skyfire and for all that he had done and failed to do.

At the time he had left 283, he had been 7,000 lightyears away from the Fabulous Arm, a month's journey. As he grew closer to arm, the stars grew thicker and younger. It would take him another three weeks to cross it. He counted the days solely by the progress of his chronometer, for there was nothing else in the timeless void to set night apart from day. When his fuel ran low, he stopped at a star to recharge. If the sun had a suitable planet, he would land and set up the solarsheets. If not, he would unfurl them in space.

One week into the Fabulous arm, a disturbing change in the pitch of the lightdrive's steady hum began to emanate from his engines. He landed immediately on the nearest planet and ran a full diagnostic. After some digging, he found that a part called the codron no longer quite fit into his beat-up thruster casings, and the "thumb" of the device had shifted so that it was now pressing against the harmonic alignment assembly. If he had had the microfactory, he could have fixed the problem in minutes. Instead, he waited a whole day while his self repair system built a bridge to force the codron away from the HAA and repaired the thumb.

Though the setback was easily dealt with, it was disheartening. His military-grade self repair system could fab simple parts and emplace them with subspace transfers, and, given time, the nanorepair system could fix almost anything one atom at a time. But it was a slow, tedious process, and Starscream chaffed at the sluggishness of his progress towards the Great Spiral even as his optics were constantly seeking the yellow sun that lay behind him.

He crossed the Fabulous arm without incident, and on day 54 he reached the inner edge of the Magnificent arm. This arm was thinner than its fellow, and it took him but a week to cross. He was returning now to a familiar area; had he not been in a hurry, he could have travelled to the first planet he and Skyfire had surveyed, a little rocky moon orbiting a blue and cream-smeared gas giant. They had engraved their names and the date of arrival on the smooth face of a basalt boulder. How long ago that seemed now.

After he passed out of the Magnificent arm, the stars began to thin. There was no real "edge" to the galaxy; the stars simply petered out until there was nothing left but emptiness. It would be another 82 days before he would truly be out of the Firework.

As the stars disappeared one by one, all became dark. In the vast, desolate silence of the outer rim, Starscream felt a sense of isolation like he had not experienced even in the arctic barrens. Always before Skyfire had been there at his wingtip, ready when he needed to talk, silent when he needed privacy, a haven to rest in if he grew tired. Now there was only silence, every day, every week, every month. All he could hear was the constant, endless hum of his own engines, or a gentle whir if he stirred his ailerons, as he often did just to hear something change. Even the sound of his own vocalizer was stifled, for his audios heard only what little sound conducted through his own metal body; the vacuum swallowed up the rest. He yelled and screamed, and heard only a faint whisper. And finally he stopped making noise at all.

Under ordinary circumstances, he would have spent the endless time organizing the data he had collected and writing up reports on his finds. But now he could found he could not bear to look at anything related to 283, and when he tried to dig up older material, it only reminded him of Skyfire. Left with no work to do, he tried to entertain himself with music and movies. But he found that any cheerful song was a dagger in his soul, and even silence was preferable to cruel joy. As for the movies, it seemed as if once-familiar characters now behaved like alien lifeforms. The dilemmas they fretted over were but petty trivialities, and he found that he could no longer echo their laughter or sympathize with their pain. How naive they seemed as they went about their lives. He envied even the most miserable of them.

The monotony was finally relieved when his engines began to make an erratic knocking noise. He could have repaired it, but his self repair system claimed that the problem was minor, so he let it go on. _ Bok __dat__ bok...bok...dat...bok...dat dat...bunnnn...dat...bok bok...__BOK!_

He listened with fascination, trying to decide if there was a pattern or not. At first, there was nothing, but after a few days a semi-repetitive sequence appeared that went: _bok bok bok...dat dat...bok dat bok dat BOK!_ Irregular noises were scattered throughout, but the familar sequence appeared over and over. Curious to see if he could affect it, he slowed down and sped up and turned on and off various systems.

After a day of experimentation, he found that he could trigger specific sequences of noises by speeding up or slowing down fractionally while turning on and off the codron and twisting his rudder to the left. He wasn't quite sure if the rudder mattered or not, because sometimes the patterns seemed to emerge without it, but at any rate it seemed to help (though he wasn't sure why).

After awhile, he found himself making words out of the noise. The _bok bok bok_ seemed to be saying, _fly fly fl__y_. Without conscious effort, he formed a rhyme out of it that matched the sequence of boks and dats, and _bok bok bok dat dat bok dat bok dat BOK!_ became _F__ly fly fly, silver Seeker in the __SKY! __F__ly fly fly, you will get home if you TRY! __D__on't stop now or you are __gonna__ DIE!_

He continued experimenting and eventually built up a repertoire of _boks_ and _dats_. Over the course of weeks he recorded hundreds of different sequences of noises, some random, some self-created. He remixed the recordings into longer rhythms to create complex melodies, then tried to play them at will by changing his speed and tweaking the codron. He could never quite replicate the tune he set out to play, because the _boks_ and _dats_ were never the same each time, yet he was sometimes pleased when the randomness produced a result that seemed to improve on his original composition. He added lyrics that fit the melodies, changing the _boks_ and _dats_ as necessary to accommodate the stress of the syllables. After trying various alternatives, he kept the refrain, _F__ly, fly, fly, silver Seeker in the sky._ In between he added verses:

_How I love to roam and travel_

_Why do my engines sound like gravel?_

_As my mind like string unravels_

_Am I just composing babble?_

At first his rhymes were simplistic, but as his melodies grew more complex he found himself rhyming phrases like "galactic seasoning" with "didactic reasoning." Some of his creations turned out to be catchy, and he played them for hours on end by making sequences of _boks_ and _dats_. When he grew bored of the pastime, he let his engines run normally, and then they played the simple tune of _fly, fly, fly, silver Seeker in the sky_ over and over again. The refrain urged him on and on with a ceaseless voice. It seemed to be telling him that he had to keep going, no matter how he felt, no matter what happened. Just keep flying. _Bok bok bok._

When he found himself having to pick an actual route between recharge stars, he knew he was reaching the end of the Firework. Now he faced the prospect of crossing the vast intergalactic Void that lay between him and the Great Spiral.

He landed on a hot, sulfur-smelling world and sat for awhile on the cracked ground, pondering the matter. The atmosphere was thin, and in the violet sky he could see five stars. One of them, a red giant just 20 lightyears away, had the unofficial name "Welcome Mat," for it was the last star on a long chain of "stepping stars" leading from the Great Spiral to the edge of the Firework. There were no planets on the stepping stars—they had been lost eons ago when mighty gravitational forces ripped the suns out of their home galaxies and flung them into the Void. Between the Welcome Mat and the next star in the chain lay a two year journey through empty space. He would have no choice but to spend it in stasis.

Starscream drew patterns in the pebbly dirt he was sitting in. Even for Skyfire, who had been built for interstellar travel, it was no small thing to cross the Void. Starscream had lain offline in Skyfire's hold for most of the trip, coming online at each stopping point to help the other jet collect energon and deal with any mechanical problems that cropped up. There was little to harm a craft coasting offline through the Void, but the sheer progress of years could wear down even brand new parts. Stale oil had to be drained and replaced, and systems produced unexplained glitches as they came back online after years of shutdown. Once Starscream had woken up to find that his lightdrive wouldn't turn on. Skyfire had been forced to repair the problem in zero gravity, for the nearest planet was 460,000 lightyears away—almost five years of travel.

Seekers were capable of interstellar flight, and he had received modifications to make him more suited to the task. But at the heart of it, he had been intended for short range travel. His designers had not envisioned him crossing the Void by himself, let alone unsupplied and without maintenance. What would he do when his oil needed to be changed (as it already did) or his lightdrive shut down again? He had a few tools left from his survival kit and the box of spare parts for his thrusters, but there was nobody to fix him except his self repair system.

Not that he had a choice. He could go on, and risk failure and death; or he could stay, and ensure failure and death. Or he could go back... He found that he had turned and was looking at the yellow star. Flinching, he forced his gaze away.

No, there was no choice. He launched himself into the thin air and directed his nose towards the red point of the Welcome Mat. It was time to begin the last leg of his journey. _Fly, fly, fly, silver Seeker in the sky. _


	16. Chapter 16

_Well, this update was long in coming, wasn't it? To make a long story short, I won NaNoWriMo, then collapsed in exhaustion. Then throughout December I was too busy to do anything. The delay was also because I wanted to edit the story before continuing on. So, every chapter has been given a preliminary edit and reuploaded. I'm also adding the last three chapters I wrote during NaNo, so this will be a triple update. :) A super thank you to everyone who commented! It was so encouraging!_

* * *

He stopped only briefly at the Welcome Mat, for he was afraid that he might still turn back. Quickly he set out the solarsheet and refilled his tanks, then gave himself a full maintenance diagnostic. With the exception of the CAPH assembly, he was in good condition—as good as it got, anyway. He left the CAPH alone; he wasn't about to fix the only interesting thing that had happened in months. Lastly he gave the drone a cursory check. It had come through fine.

When the stopover routine was complete, he fixed his optics on the next red giant in the chain, Beckoner. 200,750 light years away. Two years of coasting, offline. An irrevocable plunge.

He activated his lightdrive and began accelerating up to his top speed. Then, carefully, ever so carefully, he fixed his course upon the star. It had to be perfect, for even a single degree of inaccuracy would throw him thousands of lightyears off course. When he was satisfied at last, it was time to shut down.

A final backward glance; the yellow star gleamed. Then all was darkness.

* * *

When he came back online he was twenty-nine lightyears from the Beckoner and two years had passed. The great silver line of the Firework was visibly smaller, though the Great Spiral seemed no larger. He could feel the time in his systems; his oil was sluggish, his joints stiff. Even his mind felt dulled, though the sensation cleared quickly. There were no planets orbiting Beckoner, so he set the solarsheets out in space and hooked himself up.

As he waited, he ran diagnostics, studying the changes in his body. Everything seemed more or less functional. Still, it paid to make certain. He decided to remain at Beckoner for several days, flying laps around the sun to test his systems. He could not afford any slips now, not out here, not near the end of his journey.

Three days later he continued down the red giant road. The next star, Dorad, was only one year's journey away. After that came a three year journey to Solitary Wanderer, then a two year journey to Toramin and a short six month hop to Aontron. None of the stars had any planets, and he stayed at each one for only as long as it took to check and recharge.

At Aontron he stopped. The next star, Solitude, was eight years distant—the longest jump he had made yet. His physical condition had grown worse in spite of the maintenance stops. His oil felt _wrong_ in a way he had never experienced before. Diagnostics indicated that the friction-reducers were wearing out, and there were hot, sore spots inside him where the metal chaffed. His filters were full of fine metal powder, and his pumps were strange and stiff. He thought longingly of the box full of cartridges—but he might as well have longed to be back on Cybertron.

As he flew laps around Aontron, new errors popped up one after the other. He delayed and delayed, his impatience growing with each new problem. And even when his self repair system finally reported that everything was normal—as normal as it got, anyway—he was doubtful. Perhaps some insidious error was just waiting to emerge until he was underway.

He was so close, yet so far. Once he reached Solitude, he would be two-thirds of the way across the Void. Then there would only be three more short jumps till he would be in the Great Spiral. Eight years would seem like mere weeks; then it would be but a few months till he reached Cybertron. In fact, the Last Outpost would be only weeks away. There would be fresh oil, flavored energon, a real recharge slab, and a bright glossy finish. _And people!_ There would be people to talk to again. He felt a surge of almost unbearable longing.

He was also nine years' travel from 283. The yellow star still haunted him; even when he tried not to look at it, his optics sought it instinctively. Nine years, and that on top of the five years he spent searching. It had been fourteen years since Skyfire had vanished. By the time he reached Solitude, it would be twenty-two years. Starscream tried not to think about the likelihood that Skyfire would still be alive.

At last, after several days had passed without any new problems, he decided to continue. He still wasn't sure whether he could make it or not, but he had to start sometime. On a whim, he decided to turn the jump into three shorter jumps so that he could wake up en route to check his progress. It would require extra energon if he had to stop for repairs, so he opened up the drone and tossed out of half of the goods inside. It made him uneasy to see his supplies drifting off into space, but he reassured himself that he was close to the end anyway.

He hooked himself up to the drone again. Then, gathering up his courage, he turned his nose toward the faint red speck. This time he had to be very, very careful in his aim. Firing his engines, he began making the course corrections until his trajectory was correct to an inordinate amount of decimal places. Then at last it was time to depart.

Yet still he hesitated. Some unknown instinct filled him with forboding. But his self repair system had nothing to report, and there was nothing to fear in the Void. _Fly, fly, fly,_ his engines chanted.

He shut himself down and coasted into the abyss.

* * *

He woke up and instantly verified his position. Solitude still lay ahead of him; two years had passed. He was precisely where he should be. Relief washed over him. Now to open the drone and reenergize for the next segment.

The drone was gone.

For a moment he just stared at the spot where it had been. The connector that had joined it to him was severed. Then he exploded in curses that were swallowed up by the vacuum.

For a few futile minutes he scanned the space around him looking for it, but to no avail. The drone was long gone, and with it the box of thruster parts, the spare metal, and his extra energon cubes. Now what?

He could not afford the long stop he had planned. But he had to stop, because the error messages had multiplied like insecticons while he lay in stasis: _AB2 relay Error 53 – Check required; cog connector requires urgent maintenance; change oil now, engine retuning recommended. _Fortunately he still carried two cubes in subspace as part of his survival kit. With the time that afforded him, he would have to fix as many errors as he could.

Still coasting towards Solitude, he let his repair system work. It was slow, maddeningly slow, and in the end his energon ran low and he had to leave with half the problems uncorrecte. There would be no last stop; this final jump would take him all the way to his destination.

When he came back online, he searched for Solitude's red gleam. It was not in front of him. _Where am I?_ He stared wildly about, and found Solitude under his left wing. He was off course. Dramatically off course. With a quick calculation, he established his position. Somehow he had drifted almost 120,000 light years to the side. Error messages cried for his attention, but over them all he heard a very loud _BOK BOK BOK_ sound.

He focused in on the CAPH assembly, but nothing had changed. Yet just to the left, on the edge of the codron, he felt a strange, numb sensation. His self repair system gave no explanation. Grimly he set it to a full diagnostic of the area.

There was just enough energon left for one more course correction and a final deceleration. He could try to make it to Solitude again, but the red star was almost four years away and his body felt like it was falling to pieces. He had lost half of his supplies; he might not even have what he needed to fix the problem, which was obviously getting worse.

But there was another star nearby, a bright blue dwarf that didn't belong out here among the venerable red giants. It was but a year away—though that trajectory would take him even further off course.

For a few minutes he deliberated. If he flew to the dwarf and back it would add a two year delay to his journey. On the other hand, if he tried to make it to Solitude, he had the ominous feeling that his journey might end much sooner.

His self repair system had arrived at an answer. The annextor regulator that lay next to the CAPH assembly had been silently failing over the years. Its unnatural vibrations had gradually misaligned the CAPH assembly, causing the _bokking_ and _datting_. Suddenly the issue of the rudder made sense: when he had turned it hard left, he had put a slight pressure on the annextor regulator, stilling the vibration and temporarily relieving the CAPH assembly's discomfort in the form of fascinating patterns of _boks_.

He was disgusted with himself. He should never had indulged the malfunction, no matter how minor it had seemed. Yet this was only one of the mechanical problems now afflicting him. He needed real maintenance, and he needed it soon.

Reluctantly he looked towards the dwarf. Delay was the price of safety. He recalculated his course to compensate for the problems and set off.

* * *

He was relieved when he woke up and found the blue dwarf hovering forty light years in front of him. Conscious of his low tanks, he decelerated, angling until he fell into orbit around the sun. The dwarf was doubly abnormal in that it still had four planets. Starscream aimed for the one that had the mildest climate, a dirty brown ball with patches of liquid water. He had never been there himself, but a probe had visited the planet some 400 years ago and he knew what to expect.

He arrowed in through the thick, warm atmosphere and subspaced his lightdrive. His atmospheric thrusters came online with a jolt and his wings took up the strain of his weight with a groan. He was reminded suddenly that it was not so long ago that the avalanche had rent them apart.

As he came down, he was surprised to find the some darker patches of ground resolving into forest and field. _That_ hadn't been on the probe report. The planet hadn't been colonized, had it? But there were no lights, no transmissions to indicate civilization. Cautiously he descended until he was cruising over the landscape. There was a lake, and he swept down and landed on the shore. He misjudged the gravity and stumbled, falling to his knees. Without getting up from that position, he looked around.

After his months in space, every sensation was so vivid it almost hurt. It was earliest dawn; his knees rested in cool, damp mud. The humid air smelled sticky sweet, and there was a slight rustling that was noticeable only because he was used to perfect silence. Not a ripple disturbed the surface of the lake. In the mirror surface he could see the starless sky and the dark line of the forest.

Turning on his landing lights, he shone them on the trees. They had broad black leaves tinged with veins of color like clotted blood. Silent and motionless they hung, each branch heavy with bulbous brown fruits. Reddish grasses grew in patches beneath.

Under other circumstances he would have been excited, but now he found it was hard to care. All he wanted was to make repairs and get to Cybertron as quickly as possible. He got up and walked up to where the shore was firmer, the sudden pull of gravity making him feel heavy and clumsy.

Before he did anything, he needed to recharge. He got out the container with the solarsheets and unfurled the crinkling material. The stakes had been lost with the drone, so he simply spread out the sheet and sat down on the edge. When the sun rose in a blaze of red, he plugged himself in. He felt relief when energon began trickling into his tanks. For the next two days he stayed by the lakeside and rested.

It was not until he had begun to walk around that the true extent of his physical deterioration became evident. Parts that had not complained while he travelled through space now screeched their distress. The sore patches where the oil no longer soothed away heat and friction felt like grinding sores. His entire body ached with every move he made.

When his systems allowed, he turned off his pain sensors and wandered the woods or made careful flights around the area. It didn't take him long to figure out why the trees hadn't shown up on the probe report. The planet was an appleseed site.

About three hundred years ago, someone—a crewed ship, a robot or a simple drone, he could not say which—had passed by and seeded the planet with life. A single species of fruit-bearing tree had spread throughout all the major continents, accompanied by a few varieties of fern and moss which were probably necessary to complete the nutrient cycle. The vegetation was primitive, and he could find no defenses against insects or animal grazing—appleseed planets were usually seeded with plants drawn from worlds where such species had not evolved yet. It simplified the ecosystem by removing pollinators and herbivores from the equation. Starscream wasn't sure that the ecosystem was truly balanced, though. The paucity of species gave the impression of an amateur effort rather than an actual scientific project meant to establish a balanced plant community.

To facilitate maintenance, Starscream was forced to spend most of his time lying on the ground with one system or another shut down for maintenance. He soon grew bored, and to fill the time he planted some of the seeds that he had brought with him in the specimen cases: viral weed, blob spruce, yellow leaf, annellum. He wasn't sure how well they would take to their new environment, but he didn't suppose it would hurt to let them try. By the time he got back, the trees would either be fullgrown or dead. The appleseeders would certainly be in for a surprise. He collected samples of the few species the planet offered.

Several weeks passed. Starscream stayed by the lake or walked in the nearby forest. When the weather was good, he would open up the plates he could reach and try to fix what he could. Yet there was little enough he could do; the "problem" was not a single point of failure but a system wide degeneration. As one part failed, it triggered other problems, and these in turn caused their own cascade of faults. Even small mishaps were multiplied as their effects spilled over.

He grew weary of waiting. Day by day he sat staring out across the lake, occasionally throwing a rock in or watching a black leaf floating across the surface. When he looked into the watery mirror, a worn, harrowed face stared back at him. He might have mistaken himself for one of the Empty beggars that roamed the streets of Vos. His paint was scarred and faded. He felt old in both body and mind.

Out of boredom he began to clean the stains he noticed on his paint. He scrubbed them with sand, then picked at them with his fingers until the paint came off. The bare metal underneath was at least clean. When the worst of splotches had been dealt with, he found himself annoyed by the irregularity of metal patches that were now showing all over his body. He scratched at them, trying to make them into even, rounded shapes, but all he managed to do was to make the patches larger and more conspicuous. Irritated at himself, he decided to stop before he ended up covered with spots. His fingers, however, drifted to his paint whenever his mind wandered. Soon wide bare patches began to appear up and down his legs and shoulders.

"You look neurotic," the Seeker who was reflected in the water observed.

"So do you," he shot back.

"Well you look more more neurotic."

Now that the vacuum was gone, he could hear again. He could not stop talking. He didn't even care what he was saying, as long as he could hear his own voice. Sometimes he parroted Skyfire and made up a conversation.

"Do you suppose the blob spruce will come up, Starscream?"  
"I hope so. Though how well it will do without the squirrels, I don't know. The viral weed is doing well, anyway."

"Good to hear," Skyfire said. "That reminds me of your pet Chatterjaw. Do you miss him?"

"Yes; I hope his marker hasn't fallen over again."

"You should have made a marker for me too."

"But I don't know if you're dead or not."

"You could have made one just to be sure."

"Do you want one?" Starscream asked.

Skyfire considered. "No, I suppose not. Anyway, I don't think I'd like one made by _you_."

Starscream paused. "What do you mean?"

"I mean that you left me to my fate. Don't you see the irony in your hands fashioning my marker?"

"I know. I'm sorry."

"But not _that_ sorry. You'll soon be back on Cybertron, where you'll forget all about me in your rush to get a new paint job."

"I would never forget about you. I'm going to get a search party and come back right away."

Skyfire shook his head. "Right away? It'll be a twenty year journey back and you know it. If I'm not dead already, I will be by then. But at least the search party should be able to find my body. Then I can have a real crypt, built by someone who actually cares about me."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"I was wrong to trust you before," Skyfire said. "If I had suspected the kind of friend you really were, I would never have come out here with you. In fact, I would never have taken you for a friend at all."

"I know," Starscream said. "I'm just a worthless coward. I never deserved to be your friend."

"This might hurt you, but it needs to be said. If I'm still alive when the search party finds me, it's over between us. There are some things that are unforgiveable."

Starscream's face scrunched miserably. "But you told me I shouldn't risk myself to save you—"

"No, you misinterpreted what I said. You only told yourself that I had given you leave to go so that you would have an excuse to return to Cybertron and enjoy yourself. I actually wanted you to stay."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

"I'm afraid it's too late for apologies now, Starscream. Goodbye."

"Wait, please don't leave me—"

Starscream came to himself and found that he was rocking back and forth, his fingers biting painfully into the paint of his leg. He looked at his fingertips and saw raw, bright metal. _He won't get rid of you,_ he tried to say, but the words would not come out aloud. Wrapping his arms around his knees he gazed down at his shabby reflection in the water.

* * *

Movement still pained him when the repairs were done, such as they were. He finally came to the realization that he was never going to be fixed all the way, and if he waited he would be fixing problems forever, or at least until his self repair system couldn't keep up with it anymore. Things might have been different if he had had the cartridges. With all his supplies, he probably could have checked his decline. But now every clear fluid was black with suspended particles, and as each one failed, so did the systems it served. He thought of the great stockpiles that Skyfire carried in his hold, and the materials lab. What he wouldn't he give for one drink of fresh, clear, amber-tinted oil.

He deliberated over whether he should continue on to Solitude, or strike out across the Five Followers, a string of stars that formed their own path to the Great Spiral. If he went on with his original plan, it would take him five more years to reach Solitude, and then he would need to make three more jumps. It would take a total of thirteen years, but he would arrive mere weeks away from the Last Outpost.

On the other hand, if he passed across the Five Followers, the journey would take only ten years. The first Follower was but three years away, and after that the five stars were almost evenly spaced out at a half year apart. However, they did not lead towards Cybertron, and there lay a jump of almost five years between the last Follower and the closest star in the Great Spiral.

Starscream wanted to make up for the time he had lost on the unexpected detour, and the prospect of shaving three years off his journey was attractive. But he did not know the area in which the Five Followers emerged, and the prospect of the final five year jump gave him a nasty feeling. It would be safer to brave the five year jump to Solitude _now_, with his systems freshly repaired, than to postpone it till the end of the journey, when things would be much worse. And yet, who was to say that he would even last thirteen more years? Suppose he could only last ten years? Finally, what of Skyfire's fate? Each delay decreased the other mech's odds of survival.

He pondered the options for several days, but in the end his final decision was based on little more than a few guesses and a gut feeling. He would take the shorter route and go down the Five Followers. The half year distances between the stars would make for easy travel right up until the very end. He would stop for maintenance again just before the final five year jump. On the way there, he could brush up on the area he would arrive in and plot the way to the nearest repair station. The three years he saved might be the difference between life and death for Skyfire.

_Fly, fly, fly,_ he told himself.

* * *

He said goodbye to the dwarf. The absence of _bokking_ noises was strange, and he was filled with irrational apprehension at the silence. When the time came to shut down and coast, he was not really sure where he would wake up.

But his fears proved unfounded. He arrived uneventfully at the first Follower, and thereafter the jumps were short and easy. At each star he stopped briefly to fill his tanks. He also researched the destination where the starry path was leading him.

There had once been a dispute between Cybertron and the Dorror Republic over whether the "Clian Territory" belonged to one race or the other. After several decades of debate, the Intergalactic Coalition of Free Species had arbitrated the matter to no one's satisfaction by suggesting Colonization Rights—each settled planet would become the property of each respective race.

A brief colonization boom had been triggered as both Dorror and Cybertron sought to claim everything. Both motherplanets had offered incentives for colonists and dropped modular cities onto the best planets. But, as the years had passed, the investment fervor had died out, and without real infrastructure to support the growth most of the settlers had drifted away. Now the area was an empty network of deserted cities and rusting equipment. Only a few colonies still remained, and these lay along the trade route between Dorror and Cybertron. The maintenance stations he desperately needed would doubtless be scattered along these shipping lanes.

Starscream formed a general plan. He would head towards the nearest industrial site he could reach and scavenge up enough supplies to keep himself from dropping dead before he reached the Dorror – Cybertron trade route. The planet Nyuus had a large mining complex that had only recently been abandoned. There would be equipment there that he could cannibalize, and probably even leftover tools and lubricants. If nothing else, perhaps he could find communications equipment to summon help.

If he had to continue on from Nyuus under his own power, he would make for the Two Bug Waypoint, a tiny space station that was a month distant from Nyuus. The oddly named port had no repair facilities, but he should at least be able to buy fluids and book a passage to the nearest repair dock. From there, it would only be a matter of a three and a half month journey to Cybertron.

As he formed his plans, he drew closer and closer to the fifth Follower. He could now count the days until he arrived (minus, of course, the years he would spend in stasis).The Great Spiral grew closer and closer, a trillion beautiful stars shimmering in welcome. He could pick out Cybertron's young white star hanging like a diamond in the Diadem Cluster. His gaze rested constantly on the faint point, and he imagined sometimes that he was pulling himself closer with the force of his longing.

And then, finally, he was at the end of his path. The fifth Follower shone over two hundred times brighter than 283's yellow sun. Clouds of mercury drifted around the star's equator, and the stellar atmospherewas rich with manganese. Here he stopped to rest and recharge before making the final jump.

His body had fared better than he had dared hope. Perhaps he had hit bottom and there was nowhere else to go. Or more probably, he had learned to accomodate his condition. When he wasn't coasting, he flewgently and carefully, like an elderly mech. At each stop, he had removed several of the most decrepit systems and placed them in subspace to preserve them until he needed them again.

There were signs, however, that made him wonder if he was experiencing a false peace. Once, while orbiting the fourth Follower, his engines had stuttered out and come back on again. There was no explanation for the problem. Later, he began to hear a _vvvvvvvvVVVVVVVvvvvvvvmmmmm_ sound that appeared and disappeared seemingly at random. Again, he could find no cause for it. Starscream wondered whether his self repair systems needed repair themselves—an alarming thought. The system was decentralized and self checking, making it impossible to compromise as a whole, but the individual components could still fail.

All that remained between him and Nyuus were a few short hours of wakefulness. He could do like he had done on the way to Solitude and turn himself on during the journey—two checks should do it. It would feel as short as a trip down to the plains.

He filled up his subspaces with energon, jettisoning everything but the few items he might need for self repair. It would be enough to last for a month and a half if necessary; surely he would be able to repair any problems by then.

He fixed his nose on the orange star around which Nyuus orbited.

"Fly, fly, fly, you will get home if you try!" he shouted defiantly into the darkness.

The vacuum silenced his voice, but he plunged forward and shot towards the end of the Void.


	17. Chapter 17

Starscream had never seen anything more beautiful than the sight of Nyuus' golden star hanging before him in the blackness. Like a moth drawn to flame he approached, his sensors already picking out the gleaming sphere of the planet itself beyond a thin asteroid belt and a dead little rocky planet.

He rushed forward, laughing and screaming into the void. "I made it!" he sang to the stars that now surrounded him like a swarm of gnats. "I'm alive! I did it! I'm alive! I did it!"

Soon he would be scavenging spare parts from leftover mining equipment and sipping sweet, delicious oil. All the years of waiting were over. He was practically home already. By the end of the year he would be at Cybertron. He would save Skyfire and everything would be alright.

Joyfully he danced his way towards Nyuus, doing loops and rolls. The vacuum swallowed his laughter, but the sun smiled warm on his plating. Then eagerness overtook and he lunged forward, crossing through the asteroid belt and flying like an arrow towards Nyuus.

He never even saw it coming. One moment, he was flying effortlessly towards the planet, the next momentstabbing pain shot through him. He felt his plating rend like crumpling foil and a silent _whump_ as his interior decompressed. Then the true agony hit. He howledlike a dying animal. The stars spun in a mad whirlwind, and floating amonst them were pieces of his own body.

Some blind instinct written into him made him bring on his antigravs to stabilize himself. The stars slowed, and the flashing light of Nyuus' sun became steady again. In its harsh light he could see that he was as good as dead. His entire hold had exploded; there was nothing left of his lower facet but shredded metal. Engines were offline. A cloud of floating black beads was rapidly dispersing—his oil, gone. A tiny chunk of nickel-iron asteroid was embedded in his back, half emerged from his armor. His debris reflector should have turned it away. It hadn't.

One desperate thought emerged. He had to get to Nyuus. It was his last chance. His light drive was destroyed and he had decelerated too much to try for another system, even if could have lived long enough to reach it. But he still had his subspaced atmospheric thrusters—or did he? The subspace that held them was not even registering on his systems. He would have to drag himself to Nyuus on antigravs alone and somehow make a landing. But his tanks were almost empty.

He sought out the shape of the planet in the distance. The asteroid had knocked him far off course. With a push of his antigravs he brought himself around, only to realize that the planet was approaching too fast. If he didn't slow down, he would blast right by it. He braked on his antigravs, slowing as much as he dared. The few oil drops that had been floating with him tumbled against the back of his tail like hail.

The planet suddenly enlarged. Without warning he was in the atmosphere. Too fast still; much too fast. He pushed backwards as hard as he could. One of his antigravs overheated and shut down. A second one began to grow hot. But the third one held steady. His gave a stifled cry.

Orange red peaks filled his vision—mountains. He couldn't go down in the mountains, he had to find somewhere flat. A desert lay beyond them. He tried to aim for it. But where was the mine? He could see nothing, and then it didn't matter because the second antigrav failed and he couldn't turn aside any longer. Down, down, down he plunged, the wind screaming through his fractured plating. His armor was half-gone; he could the friction cooking his insides. There was an explosion as a hydraulic cylinder burst. His fuselage ripping apart and flying off. He screamed as his paintless hull burnt like an ember.

Somehow he tried to catch air under his shattered wings. His ailerons flapped madly in the wind. Now he was beginning to whirl almost lazily as he streaked downwards. Terrified instincts shrieked that he was going into a deathspiral. He could see dry river beds below him. Where was the desert now? Everything was spinning, faster and faster. His last antigrav was overheating.

Then he was shooting over the desert, flying like a meteor. He was going too fast to transform, but perhaps if he could stop the spin he could catch enough air to skid on his belly. It was his only chance. He stopped trying to brake and threw his antigrav into the task of reversing the spin. His wings slowly stabilized. He felt the first touches of lift buoying him up. A horrible vibration instantly began to run through his body. The howling wind was flapping one of his broken wings. It tore off with a screech of metal.

Then he was going down. He saw the desert floor careening up at him, and screamed—and all was pain and darkness.

* * *

For a moment he thought he had been caught in a second avalanche. His legs were buried and he could feel something pressing around his face. All was black and still. Then he lifted his head (_Why am I in robot mode?_) and earth fell away from his face. Through a single cracked optic, he saw a vast, bleak expanse of rust-colored silt studded with black rocks. The sun hung low over the horizon. There was nothing in sight, no mine, no people, nothing. The effort of looking around cost too much energy and he let his head fall down again. He lost consciousness.

A few hours later he awoke. It was night, and a thin sprinkling of stars stared down upon him. By their faint light, he twisted his head to examine himself. A dune had half buried his legs, and his upper body was a barely recognizable mass of scrap. _Why aren't I dead?_ he wondered. Nothing that looked like he did should still be alive.

He realized he was in emergency conservation mode. There was barely any energon left in his remaining tank, and within minutes it would be gone. The solarsheets. He had to set up the solarsheets before he blacked out for good.

His mind instructed his arm to open the subspace in his side and take out the solarsheet container. But his arm just lay there in the dust. As he stared at it, he had the disembodied feeling that it wasn't his arm (his arm wasn't charred like that and missing three fingers) but someone else's. He turned to his other arm, which looked just as bad, and it gave a twitch. Relief flooded him.

The only problem was that the solarsheets were on the other side of his body. He would have to sit up. He tried to push himself up with his arm, but though it made diligent pushing motions, nothing happened. He let himself sag back into the dust.

The stars glittered down on him like cold crystals. Starscream was grateful that he was going to offline in a place with stars. He had secretly dreaded dying in the Void, where no one would ever find him. It was better to perish here in his home galaxy, on a planet where people had once lived.

The dust was silken smooth. It had settled over him him like a shroud, and already the dune was giving him a burial. He wished it would have waited a little longer, for he did not like having his limbs trapped, but he supposed he would be offline before it covered him up completely. He offed his cracked optic. There was a rock wedged into the socket of the optic that wouldn't turn on. All was silent but the rush of the wind and the hiss of the dune as it crept slowly over him.

_I tried Skyfire, _he thought. He would pay for his failure. Yes, at last he could truly pay for everything he had done. The wind whistled through his shredded chassis. He laid his head back in the dust to wait.

Minutes crept by one by one. He dreaded and longed for release. Thousands of grains of sand crawled along with a gentle sound like snow crystals blowing across the ice. The wind whistled through the ragged remains of his wings, making the loose pieces rattle and knock.

_Starscream, _a voice whispered somewhere nearby.

He brought his optic back online and lifted his head. _Skyfire...?_ He tried to call his friend's name, but though he meant to speak aloud, only his lips moved.

Silence. There was always silence. Starscream let his head sink down again. When would he learn?

_I'm sorry,_ he whispered to the wind, hoping that somehow it would carry his voice to Skyfire's audios. _I'm sorry for everything._

Static was peppering his vision. He had a feeling that he was floating; his face had gone numb, and there was no feeling in his hands. It occurred to him that if there was an afterlife, perhaps Skyfire would be there.

_I'm coming..._ he whispered, his lips forming a tremulous smile. _We'll be together again. If you still want me._

He wondered if he still had the geode. It should be in the subspace he could reach, providing that his arm would still move. Somehow it did. He tried to retrieve the geode, but found himself holding the solarsheet container instead.

_The solarsheet—? _

He always kept it on the other side, but he must have mistakenly put it back in the wrong subspace. Starscream fumbled to open it, but the container slipped out of his numb hand. He searched for it desperately, his fingers probing the dirt like blind worms.

Something resisted his fingertips. The scratched, dusty grey cannister glittered in the starlight. He grasped it and opened the catch.

The wind rustled the solarsheet inside. Reaching back into subspace, he withdrew the transfer cable. With clumsy hands, he clipped one end onto the solarsheet and the other into the half buried transfer port on his chest. Then he yanked out a handful of the solarsheet. The wind caught it and pulled it out. With an effort, he rolled a nearby rock onto it to keep it from blowing away.

_There,_ he thought. _Now I'll...rest..._

His tanks were empty. He shut down.

* * *

Starscream picked weakly at his paint with the few good fingers he had left. Or perhaps the paint was gone by now; he couldn't tell. Most of his body had lost feeling—probably because it was full of silt. Silt in his intakes, silt in his wounds, silt covering his spider-webbed optic and darkening the sun that blazed down on his back. His self repair system had already lost the battle, though the nanites didn't know it yet. In little pockets where energon yet flowed, they fought on, healing and cleansing. But it did not matter what they accomplished, because his main systems were failing faster than the nanites could fix. He might linger for a few more days, a week if he was lucky, and then it would be over.

He had activated his distress beacon, but there had been no reponse. Nor did he think there would be. No one lived in the area, and the mine had been abandoned for decades. By the time help arrived, he would be a Seeker-shaped phenoclast embedded in the Starscream Shale.

The taste of defeat was bitter as the silt in his mouth. He would not have minded dying so much if it had not been for the fact that Skyfire's fate depended on his own. It might have been a welcome release to slacken his grip and let the punishment he had earned fall upon him. But murderer and weakling though he was, he was still Skyfire's only chance for rescue.

Skyfire's fate haunted him even as he tried to prepare himself for the end. Could he put himself into stasis so that if/when rescuers came in decade or two, they could repair him so that he might finish his mission? He wasn't sure. So many of his stasis-critical subspaces were offline or missing. Perhaps it didn't matter though; even without subspace, his personality matrices could potentially last for years in a dry environment before destabilizing—provided that he could keep the silt out.

His emergency beacon had an independent power supply and would keep on broadcasting for weeks after he was offline. If he hooked up the solarsheet directly to the beacon's power system, it could conceivably keep broadcasting as long as the sheet remained unburied. He had already directed the remnants of his self repair system towards that final task. He modified the beacon's message, adding the coordinates for Skyfire's disappearance and an explanation for what had happened. As a backup, he took a rock and etched the same message into the metal of his dead arm.

Now there was only one last task: to seal out the silt as best he could. He still had a welding torch in one of his surviving fingers; he used it to close up as many cracks in his upper body as he could. Finally there were only three openings left to seal up: his two eyes and his mouth. He dreaded the final step, but he knew it was best to do it while he still had the strength.

One last time he out the geode. The red and blue crystals glowed brilliantly in the sunlight, and when he turned the stone over, there was was Skyfire's message: "Crack it open. :)" A surge of pity filled him—pity for Skyfire, pity for his own fate, for the naive, happy twosome they had once been. Now his friend was gone, and he himself was dying alone, far from Skyfire's side. If only he had stayed on 283. If only he could have perished in the storm with Skyfire. If only he had gone after Skyfire right away. If only, if only. _I failed him every step of the way,_ he thought wearily. _I should never have let him trust me at all. _He stared at the words scratched by Skyfire's long-vanished hand until the light began to fade.

At last he placed the geode gently at his side, touching him. It was time to begin his last task. With much tugging and twisting, he managed to extract the rock from his optic. He ejected the welding torch and laboriously cut two short rectangular pieces from his intake. These he placed over his broken optics and melted in place. Streaks of liquid metal ran down his cheeks like hot tears, sealing his inner circuitry from contamination. Finally he closed up his mouth with a fiery finger.

When he was finished, he felt like a corpse prepared for the underworld. Blind, mute and almost without feeling, he reached down and grasped the geode. The wind whispered words in his audios that he could not quite understand. He thought he heard Skyfire's voice asking where he was, then it turned into the swishing of dust over his face.

He told himself he should shut down. It didn't matter whether he went offline now or in a day or two; there was no point in lingering on. _Just get it over with quickly_. But he was afraid. _You always were a coward,_ he sneered. _But you'll die soon enough anyway._

One by one his remaining systems died. He morbidly tracked their progress, guessing at how many minutes each one would last till failure. When another silently vanished, he grasped the geode as he might have grasped Skyfire's hand. In the darkness he tried to remember the feeling of Skyfire's big hand resting between his wings, a fond smile in those blue optics. But somehow he had forgotten what it felt like to be touched, and all he could envision in Skyfire's optics was disappointment. _I'm sorry,_ he thought.

Time passed. When it was cool, he knew it was evening; when it was hot, he knew it was day. The wind blew by, and the sand crept up his chest. He weakly tried to brush it away, but it came inexorably. He realized that his plan to keep the beacon running after he went offline would fail. The solarsheet would be covered up as soon as he was no longer there to brush it clean. There was no choice now but to keep living as long as he could; it was his last duty to Skyfire.

He knew when the end came. The invisible sun was hot. His mind wandered, and his blind optics gazed upon the towers of Vos. The constellations in the sky were familiar as his own wings, and there were contrails crossing it. Then, looking down, he saw the home of his youth, and faces he had not seen for centuries: Skyhawk, his old landlady; Pyre, the Decepticon who had tried so hard to make him into a warrior; Mingler; Pristina; Openhand; faces he hadn't seen for years. Then he was at the Science Academy again, a young, uncertain student who would have rather been anywhere but there. He saw Constant, his first teacher; Biomass, the head of the xenology department; Volteus, Astrogazer, Rockhound, Probe...on and on the procession went.

Then his audios began to fail. The hissing of the wind became the sound of a giant snake as it coiled around him, then the howl of thousands of flakes of snow as they buried him alive. He heard Skyfire's engines, roaring about on a search pattern as the big jet looked for him. Then slowly the world began to go dull.

_Hello? Is there anyone there? Hello?_

Voices. Yet they were not words that he heard with his audios. He knew it was a hallucination, yet...it tickled something in the back of his mind. _His commlink!_ It had been years, but he was receiving a message over his commlink.

The engine sounds became louder. He tried to shout, but his mouth was sealed shut. He thought to use his own commlink, but the transmitter was dead. _I'm here,_ he thought desperately. _Stop, stop, I'm here!_

But the engines were moving away. In a mad fury he tried to free his arm from the silt. Slowly, an inch at a time, it came loose. A snarl of frustration burned behind his shut lips. _Let go of me!_ he yelled at the silt.

His arm broke loose. He raised it and waved weakly at the sky. But the engines steadily retreated. He realized that he was the color of dust, and there was nothing to attract notice but his half-buried head and the solarsheet.

_The solarsheet!_

He reached for it and groped for the rock holding it down. He heard his fingers clink against against something hard (the rock?) and seized it. With one last effort, he shoved it aside.

There was a sudden rustling, and the sound of grains trickling across foil. He desperately grabbed at the sheet, willing the wind to pick it up. _Hurry! Please, hurry! _he pleaded. _Skyfire, help me!_

A rush of wind came with a _whoosh. _The sheet slipped from his hand. There was a crackling of foil, then the sound vanished into the wind. But the engines were faint now. He listened anxiously. They disappeared, and the world went silent.

He collapsed in the dust. All was quiet, all was dark, all was still. The last thing he felt was the heat of the sun. Then it too dimmed, leaving him cold as death.

Perhaps—he could not be sure—he felt Skyfire's hand slip around his and grip tight.


	18. Chapter 18

"Starscream? Are you awake?" a feminine voice asked. A hand touched his shoulder and shook him gently.

He was in a cool place. Metal hummed softly underneath him. It reminded him of Skyfire's hold, but quieter—like when Skyfire was coasting. There was no pain in his body; even the constant background ache and heat were gone. His tanks were full. Everything felt smooth, oiled, clean.

"Starscream?" the femme asked again.

"Give him a few more minutes," a masculine voice said. "We don't want to trigger another fit."

Footsteps retreated quietly. A door closed.

For awhile he lay there, resting. The hum was soothing, and he could hear soft voices talking in low tones somewhere beyond the door. Occasionally he heard his name mentioned.

After awhile he grew curious about what they were saying. He brought his optics online; they were no longer cracked. Everything was startlingly sharp and clear.

He was lying on a recharge slab in a narrow room. The golden orange walls were framed with patterns of trapezoids and triangles. A plant with bold blue flowers rested on a stand in the corner. He sensed was the room was familiar, though he couldn't remember being there before.

He sat up, and as he did so he got a glimpse of himself. Light glimmered on the sleek, glossy lines of his body. His red was _red_ and his blue was _blue_. His silver seemed to catch the light and glow with inward fire. There was not a single scratch, dent, or speck of dirt. He stared and stared.

After awhile, his gaze turned to the little table beside him. There was a full energon cube on it, and next to it was a small bowl of energon goodies, a bottle of engine cleaner, and a can of oil. He reached for the cube and took an experimental sip. It was the best high grade he had ever tasted. He would have drunk the whole thing if it hadn't been for the fact that his tanks were already full to the brim. Smacking his lips, he sipped oil and cleaner from the other containers. When he was finished, he held the treasures in his lap, gazing down at them in wonder.

The door opened, and a feminine face with a red pair of optics poked inside. He knew her—didn't he? Her name was...

"Oh, you're up," she said. "How are you feeling?"

He tried to say "good," but all that came out was a croak. She looked at him aslant, then glanced back over her shoulder.

"Bolt?" she said.

The mech he had heard before entered. Bolt was a heavy looking mech that Starscream somehow knew transformed into a small cargo pod. His optics were orange. In an overcheerful tone, he asked,

"So, how ya doing? We've been worried about you."

Starscream fumbled for words for a moment, then stammered out, "I-I'm good." Did his voice sound different? It seemed...richer, better modulated then he remembered.

"That's good to hear."

There was a pause. Bolt and Wrench—the femme was Wrench, he remembered her name now—shot a quick glance at each other.

Bolt came down and sat next to him on the slab. She patted his wing, and Starscream gave an involuntary start at the unfamiliar sensation. How long had it been since he had been touched?

"Hey now, relax," Bolt said. "There's no one gonna hurt you here. We're your friends, remember?"

Starscream nodded slowly. Had it been a week (two weeks?) since he had come here? Why was his memory so uncertain? The last clear thing he remembered was the flutter of solarsheet flying away on the wind.

"What...happened?" he asked. The words came haltingly, as though he had forgotten how to speak. "You...saved me?"

Wrench gave him an encouraging smile. "Yes, that's right. We heard your distress call and came looking for you. You were in bad shape."

Starscream's brow furrowed as he tried to remember.

"Listen, you should get some rest," Bolt said. "But would you like anything? Movies, games, reading material? I can get you anything but a net connection."

Starscream shook his head no. Suddenly he felt tired again. His head began to sink, and his optics dulled of their own volition. Bolt stood and scooped up the cube and cans from his lap. Starscream laid down on the slab and went offline again.

* * *

Later he learned that he had suffered processor damage in the crash. Or maybe "processor damage" was just a euphemism for "nervous breakdown." Apparently everything had gone smoothly at first. He had seemed fine when they reactivated him after what he later learned had been a full week of juryrigged repairs. There had been some initial confusion on the part of his rescusers on how he had come to be half-buried on Nyuus with his face mutilated; they had come to the assumption that he had been tortured and jettisoned by the local pirates. But he had quickly cleared the misunderstanding up.

When Bolt had expressed admiration for his coolness in the face of death, Starscream had supposedly waved it off with a remark that it was only a matter of doing what he needed to survive. Up till that point he had been lucid and calm; perhaps a bit clumsy in his speech, but that was to be expected under the circumstances. Then he had asked for some oil. This seemed an odd request since his oil had already been replaced, but Wrench and Bolt saw no harm in granting it. They helped him limp to the storeroom where the fluids and energon were kept. While Wrench provided a support for him to lean on, Bolt opened the door and suggested that he pick out whatever he needed.

For a moment he had not moved. Then his face scrunched up and his lips began to tremble. Without warning, he grabbed hold of Wrench and began to weep. After that his conduct could no longer be described as rational. Still holding onto her hand, he grabbed for the nearest oil container and began to gulp it down. Even when his tank was full, he kept drinking, though the fluid just flowed down his chin. When the container was empty, he tried to drink an entire four-pack of engine cleaner, which would have poisoned him even if he hadn't been half-dead.

It took both Bolt and Wrench to separate him from the engine cleaner, and this despite his condition. They carried him, grease-stained and crying, back to the maintenance room and spent two hours calming him down.

From then on, he alternated between recharging and trying to binge on fluids. They had to lock the storeroom up to keep him out. They also had to lock the ship's airlock, because he had insisted that he was going back to save Skyfire (even though his lightdrive was still offline). He would become agitated if he was left alone for any period of time.

At last they had reached a spacedock where he could receive a full overhaul. Almost every part of his body had to be replaced. At this point, Bolt and Wrench had contacted the numbers Starscream had listed in the distress beacon's message. They were able to get in touch with Volteus and some of his other colleagues at the Science Academy. After some discussion, they had agreed to bring Starscream back to Cybertron in exchange for standard passenger fare—a generous gesture on their part, since they did not carry passengers and were not on their way to Cybertron. But as they explained, they had wanted to follow the adventure through to the end.

After the overhaul, where some "possible processor damage" was fixed, Starscream had become steadily more coherent. He recharged less and less, and stopped trying to drink everything in sight. A week after they had left the space station, he awoke without memories of what had happened.

Gradually he pieced together the events that had led up to his rescue. The ship he was on was named the _Grappler._ It was a salvage vessel, one of many that operated among the derelict colonies. Wrench and Bolt were a husband and wife scrapper operation; they drifted around, cannibalizing wrecks and abandoned facilities. When they had received his distress call, they had been taking apart a platinum mine several systems over. They came at once, but when they arrived they saw nothing but dunes below—until Bolt had noticed the black solarsheet flapping across the desert. They had gone in for a closer look and seen Starscream's arm and face sticking out of the sand. By the time they had landed and begun to pull him out, he had lost consciousness.

Curiousity drove Starscream to find out what had happened to the debris deflector. The remains of his old body shell had been crated up, but after a bit of digging he found the deflector—it was mostly intact—and dissected it. The inside was coated with black goo. When he touched it with a molecular probe, he found that it contained a bonded structure of carboxylic acid, organic alcohol, and glycerols. _Fat_. A long, hard laugh erupted from his lips. 283 had almost killed him after all.


End file.
